Students love music, and it's a hotbed of IP issues, with sampling (play excerpts of a few rap tracks and the songs they sample from at the start of the lecture for dramatic effect), the split between copyright of the song and the recording of the song, moral objections to the RIAA's music copyright cartel, atrists rights, copyright extension, airplay fees vs payola, rights to make cover versions and parodies, the right not to have derogatory cover versions, the 'happy birthday' copyright fiasco, the way Tony Blair just accepted a free holiday on Cliff Richard's private tropical Island just before the music business is going to push for a Disney-style copyright extension over here to keep Cliff's early work in copyright... I could go on... for at least 75 minutes!
Indeed, which is why I suggest that money is only pumped into acts that score well on peer reviews. Imagine the joy of slappin Britney Spiers with a (-1, overrrated)!
If IBM just wanted to use one-click for free, I'm sure they would have merely threatened to set the nazgul on Amazon (in the same way that Apple seem to have done with their deal to use one-click that involved a nebulous 'ip exchange' rather than an cash payment in Amazon's favour).
The mention of the 1980s leads me to think IBM might actually be trying to kill off one-click. Patents last for 20 years maximum so if IBM have something from before 1986 that covers it, then it's in now in the public domain. This would fit perfectly with IBM's current 'be the good guys' strategy.
a) It's better to buy newer copyrights, because 'nearly expired' copyrights will run out soon, and taking an optimistic stance that common sense will prevail over the Disneys of the world and reduce the length of copyrights in future.
b) It's going to be cheaper to buy things before they are successful rather than after
and
c) Authors of copyrighted works will object to thier income supply being turned off
I suggest investing in new talent.
Offer musicians the following deal:
1) We'll press your music onto CDs, and sell them to anyone in the world for $10 each. You get 80% of any profits. 2) We'll sell mp3s, and lossless files at $0.99 a track and give you 80% of the profits 3) 5 years from the day we make it available, it goes into the public domain. 4) Here's a community of freelance record producers, cd-inlay designers, marketing organisations, tour managers etc. who are willing work for a percentage if they like your music. Do anything you like with them, but we get the rights, and it all goes into the public domain after 5 years. 5) We pay an advance or do marketing based on peer-review of your work, if your music is really good, you'll get a big advance against future earnings from our $100m. 6) We charge $0 per play for radio and TV performances.
That's a whole load better than any RIAA company will do, any major artist at the end of a contract would jump at it, and radio/TV stations will love it too.
Any system that is badly protected enough to get infected is probably already bogging down and in danger of the user getting it fixed. This is probably a very good strategy to improve the usefulness of the machine to the hijacker, and reduce the chances of the user doing anything about the infection. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before.
Well, obviously you plug the EyeTV into your laptop to watch it with your laptop, so unless this non-techy person has friends with broadband but no TV, the only advantage of this device is it will work in realtime from an overseas location that has broadband access, or if you have a broadband-equipped phone with a big enough screen to watch TV comfortably and a price-plan that makes moving this much data to a phone affordable (if such a thing exists).
I still don't get why people would swap those tiny advantages for the price hike, reduced quality and inability to record. This looks like far too little, far too late to me. If usability is the supposed advantage, I'd happily bet that Apple's iTV (whatever it may turn out to actually be) will turn out to have the edge there.
So, it's like the EyeTV but it costs twice as much, doesn't record, isn't yet Mac compatible, does lossy recompression on everything and won't let you watch programmes on more than 1 device at a time?
Well, I visited their site, and it doesn't say what the damn thing actually is (or if it does, it's in a non-obviousl place), and after 2 minutes 30 of the video, all I know is that the developer doesn't know that the Dock is called the Dock. However, the interviewer does say "awsome" at least once in every sentence, so it must be good!
If you've only heard the story on the radio, them it's not a question of spelling, it's more about guessing if name follows the pattern set by iTunes of a single letter then a word. YouTube really should have put in a decent offer for the utube url long ago, and put a redirect in place.
Here in Britain we had a worse case, the Waitrose supermarket made a heavy push into online sales, but rather than use waitrose.co.uk, they chose a new name. They rolled out a huge radio campaign to drive traffic to ocado.com, or perhaps it was acardo.com, or maybe acado, or ocardo, or acardoh, or orcardoh or acawdo or akardo or... nowadays they have an an ifuriating jingle in the radio ads where URL is spelt out letter by letter, meaning that I am a) now able to spell it and b) boycotting them. So much for marketing!
The real question is, given that Apple's prices are almost identical, do I go with their 30" (2560 x 1600 pixels) screen, or two of their 23" (1920 x 1200) screens?
If Apple wanted to do some really useful research, they could find out if the head turning, central gap and long horizontal mouse movements of the twin set-up outweigh the benefits of about 600,000 extra pixels.
Or at least I will be when I get my wii for Christmas.
Seriously Sony, stop rubbing salt in the wounds. You are years late, with a machine that has been cut from having 4 9-core Cell chips to 1 7-core chip, and here in England we are still smarting from last Christmas when there were too few PSPs to go round and we were forced to buy up to 4 bundled junk games if we wanted one.
If you don't put a foot wrong for the next few years, I'll eventually pick up a cheap secondhand PS3... but only if Gran Turismo 5 is any good, and that's about all you can hope for from this once loyal PS2 purchaser.
The mmporg Runescape already sticks to a strict 'new quest every week' schedule, and it seems to be working very well. There is generally somewhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours of new content that can be played each week (if you have high enough levels), which really helps break up the 'grind' of levelling up.
This approach seems to work really well, and the fact that it's a low-spec java based game means that the cost of developing the extra content is not prohibitive, and when the users have a problem with an update it's not the same sort of 'game over' situation that Star Wars Galaxies found itself in. Things can be redone if needed, for example after 10,000 complaints about the interface changing 7 days ago, a compromise redesign was rolled out today, without interrupting this week's new quest.
This 'lots of content/less glitz' approach fits in nicely with the retro-gaming movement, favouring gameplay over graphics. Runescape isn't the prettiest mmporg, but it sure has a lot of actual content.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes Apple to ship 8-core machines (or in intel speak, twin core 2 quad machines... what were they thinking?). Steve Jobs drives a hard bargain, and I wouldn't mind betting that in return for handing Intel his 8% of the computer market, and ruling out AMD chis for the forseeable future, he extracted something pretty special from Intel. I wonder if Apple has 'first dibs' on these, especially given that OSX's multithreading might well be more flattering to the chips than Windows.
Indeed, the film was in the era of the speak-and-spell, so speech synthesis was not too outlandish. The really implausible part of War Games was that WOPR took several seconds (and aparrently several thousand guesses) to brute force the final character of the alphanumeric missile unlock code.
"Microsoft admits Vista is so broken, that another 650,000 people in Europe alone will be needed to keep it running."
Did nobody in Microsoft's PR department see that this is bad news of monstrous proportions? Were they really shouted down by people who think the public is gullible enough to believe the 'broken=good for the economy' spin? At a time when businesses like mine can see no benefit whatsoever to changing to Vista, I'm stunned that they didn't bury this story as deep as they could. There's something seriously wrong with a company that believes it's own hype to this extent.
You are allowed to put out your own tape, and you are allowed to make tarps that dont need tape too. The thing you can't do is sell your tape unreasonably cheaply by subsidising the cost of developing and manufacturing your tape with the profits from your monopoly on tarps. If you include the tape by default, you are gaining a monopoly in tarp-tape by leveraging your monopoly in tarps, because the cost of your tape is built-in to the cost of the tarp. If your tarp-tape is any good, you should be able to rely on brand loyalty and your tape-making skills to sell it.
If you owned both markets, you have strong financial incentives to sell tarps with worse holes, tape that needs replacing often, and even to invent new problems in your next tarp which require another expensive fix, which (if you dig into your war chest a bit) you can own the market for too.
Following your analogy, changing to making tarps without holes would be legal, but giving away tape until the tape makers all go bust isn't. The reason it's not legal is that you could then charge a fortune for tape once you own the sole supply.
This is exactly what mircosoft are doing, giving away security software until all the other makers die off. It would be prefectly legal for them to sell their security software seperately at a reasonable price, what they cant legally do is subsidise the security software with profits from Windows.
The reason it can't be legal to do this is because once you have a monopoly on tarps and tape, you could use your increased size to corner the market in more and more products, and eventually own everything, or gain control of something then raise the price to ridiculous levels.
I think I speak for a lot of Europeans when I say... AAAAAAAAAARRRRGH when's it coming out over here?
Here in Britain, Sony have already admitted they prefer selling to the rest of the world, and won't let us have any until after the Christmas sales rush, which has pissed off a LOT of gamers.
The big question here is will Nintendo also treat us like second-class citizens and hand the British games market to MS on a plate by giving them a second uncontested Christmas?
The EU doesn't 'want' anything. All this is about is making MS follow the same law that every company and citizen of the EU has to follow, a law which boils down to "If you happen to have a monopoly in one product, you cannot use that monopoly position to gain an unfair advantage in other areas."
Microsoft have consistently broken this law an many fields, and the EU justice system has been amazingly lenient with the company for many years.
This joke appeared on he UK tv show "Spitting Image" in the late 1980s, around the time the astronomical community was actually trying to get us to pronounce it 'ooranus' as opposed you 'your-anus'.
A newscaster (Sir Alistair Campbell if memory serves me correctly) was shown announcing the name change to "boo-mo-lay', followed after a second or so by a picture of the planet, captioned "Bumhole".
I laughed a lot... but in my defence I was about 13 years old at the time.
It's not no beverages, it's no carry on beverages. From watching the BBC news channel, I gather the attackers planned to use 2 or more liquids that were individually safe, possibly in drinks bottles, then meet up and mix them to form something explosive when they were on the plane and in the air. This explains why you can put things in the hold, but not carry them as hand luggage. Any chemists out there care to tell us how plausible this idea is?
Contrary to popular Slashdotter belief, the UK security forces are actually very good at stopping terrorists, the wealthy (US-funded) IRA were foiled again and again during their long terror campaign over here.
Slashdot Mirror
Students love music, and it's a hotbed of IP issues, with sampling (play excerpts of a few rap tracks and the songs they sample from at the start of the lecture for dramatic effect), the split between copyright of the song and the recording of the song, moral objections to the RIAA's music copyright cartel, atrists rights, copyright extension, airplay fees vs payola, rights to make cover versions and parodies, the right not to have derogatory cover versions, the 'happy birthday' copyright fiasco, the way Tony Blair just accepted a free holiday on Cliff Richard's private tropical Island just before the music business is going to push for a Disney-style copyright extension over here to keep Cliff's early work in copyright... I could go on... for at least 75 minutes!
Indeed, which is why I suggest that money is only pumped into acts that score well on peer reviews. Imagine the joy of slappin Britney Spiers with a (-1, overrrated)!
If IBM just wanted to use one-click for free, I'm sure they would have merely threatened to set the nazgul on Amazon (in the same way that Apple seem to have done with their deal to use one-click that involved a nebulous 'ip exchange' rather than an cash payment in Amazon's favour).
The mention of the 1980s leads me to think IBM might actually be trying to kill off one-click. Patents last for 20 years maximum so if IBM have something from before 1986 that covers it, then it's in now in the public domain. This would fit perfectly with IBM's current 'be the good guys' strategy.
Reasoning that:
a) It's better to buy newer copyrights, because 'nearly expired' copyrights will run out soon, and taking an optimistic stance that common sense will prevail over the Disneys of the world and reduce the length of copyrights in future.
b) It's going to be cheaper to buy things before they are successful rather than after
and
c) Authors of copyrighted works will object to thier income supply being turned off
I suggest investing in new talent.
Offer musicians the following deal:
1) We'll press your music onto CDs, and sell them to anyone in the world for $10 each. You get 80% of any profits.
2) We'll sell mp3s, and lossless files at $0.99 a track and give you 80% of the profits
3) 5 years from the day we make it available, it goes into the public domain.
4) Here's a community of freelance record producers, cd-inlay designers, marketing organisations, tour managers etc. who are willing work for a percentage if they like your music. Do anything you like with them, but we get the rights, and it all goes into the public domain after 5 years.
5) We pay an advance or do marketing based on peer-review of your work, if your music is really good, you'll get a big advance against future earnings from our $100m.
6) We charge $0 per play for radio and TV performances.
That's a whole load better than any RIAA company will do, any major artist at the end of a contract would jump at it, and radio/TV stations will love it too.
Any system that is badly protected enough to get infected is probably already bogging down and in danger of the user getting it fixed. This is probably a very good strategy to improve the usefulness of the machine to the hijacker, and reduce the chances of the user doing anything about the infection. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before.
Well, obviously you plug the EyeTV into your laptop to watch it with your laptop, so unless this non-techy person has friends with broadband but no TV, the only advantage of this device is it will work in realtime from an overseas location that has broadband access, or if you have a broadband-equipped phone with a big enough screen to watch TV comfortably and a price-plan that makes moving this much data to a phone affordable (if such a thing exists).
I still don't get why people would swap those tiny advantages for the price hike, reduced quality and inability to record. This looks like far too little, far too late to me. If usability is the supposed advantage, I'd happily bet that Apple's iTV (whatever it may turn out to actually be) will turn out to have the edge there.
That's "now" as in "eventually", right?
So, it's like the EyeTV but it costs twice as much, doesn't record, isn't yet Mac compatible, does lossy recompression on everything and won't let you watch programmes on more than 1 device at a time?
Why am I supposed to be impressed, exactly?
Well, I visited their site, and it doesn't say what the damn thing actually is (or if it does, it's in a non-obviousl place), and after 2 minutes 30 of the video, all I know is that the developer doesn't know that the Dock is called the Dock. However, the interviewer does say "awsome" at least once in every sentence, so it must be good!
If you've only heard the story on the radio, them it's not a question of spelling, it's more about guessing if name follows the pattern set by iTunes of a single letter then a word. YouTube really should have put in a decent offer for the utube url long ago, and put a redirect in place.
Here in Britain we had a worse case, the Waitrose supermarket made a heavy push into online sales, but rather than use waitrose.co.uk, they chose a new name. They rolled out a huge radio campaign to drive traffic to ocado.com, or perhaps it was acardo.com, or maybe acado, or ocardo, or acardoh, or orcardoh or acawdo or akardo or... nowadays they have an an ifuriating jingle in the radio ads where URL is spelt out letter by letter, meaning that I am a) now able to spell it and b) boycotting them. So much for marketing!
The real question is, given that Apple's prices are almost identical, do I go with their 30" (2560 x 1600 pixels) screen, or two of their 23" (1920 x 1200) screens?
If Apple wanted to do some really useful research, they could find out if the head turning, central gap and long horizontal mouse movements of the twin set-up outweigh the benefits of about 600,000 extra pixels.
Or at least I will be when I get my wii for Christmas.
Seriously Sony, stop rubbing salt in the wounds. You are years late, with a machine that has been cut from having 4 9-core Cell chips to 1 7-core chip, and here in England we are still smarting from last Christmas when there were too few PSPs to go round and we were forced to buy up to 4 bundled junk games if we wanted one.
If you don't put a foot wrong for the next few years, I'll eventually pick up a cheap secondhand PS3... but only if Gran Turismo 5 is any good, and that's about all you can hope for from this once loyal PS2 purchaser.
Tesco here in Britain have Apple iBooks for an amazing £0.03 less than the Apple website price!
The mmporg Runescape already sticks to a strict 'new quest every week' schedule, and it seems to be working very well. There is generally somewhere between 30 minutes and 3 hours of new content that can be played each week (if you have high enough levels), which really helps break up the 'grind' of levelling up.
This approach seems to work really well, and the fact that it's a low-spec java based game means that the cost of developing the extra content is not prohibitive, and when the users have a problem with an update it's not the same sort of 'game over' situation that Star Wars Galaxies found itself in. Things can be redone if needed, for example after 10,000 complaints about the interface changing 7 days ago, a compromise redesign was rolled out today, without interrupting this week's new quest.
This 'lots of content/less glitz' approach fits in nicely with the retro-gaming movement, favouring gameplay over graphics. Runescape isn't the prettiest mmporg, but it sure has a lot of actual content.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes Apple to ship 8-core machines (or in intel speak, twin core 2 quad machines... what were they thinking?). Steve Jobs drives a hard bargain, and I wouldn't mind betting that in return for handing Intel his 8% of the computer market, and ruling out AMD chis for the forseeable future, he extracted something pretty special from Intel. I wonder if Apple has 'first dibs' on these, especially given that OSX's multithreading might well be more flattering to the chips than Windows.
Indeed, the film was in the era of the speak-and-spell, so speech synthesis was not too outlandish. The really implausible part of War Games was that WOPR took several seconds (and aparrently several thousand guesses) to brute force the final character of the alphanumeric missile unlock code.
just for the archive... wii.com now says 8th December, at £179 (249 Euros) - that's a LOT cheaper than the xbox 360.
"Microsoft admits Vista is so broken, that another 650,000 people in Europe alone will be needed to keep it running."
Did nobody in Microsoft's PR department see that this is bad news of monstrous proportions? Were they really shouted down by people who think the public is gullible enough to believe the 'broken=good for the economy' spin? At a time when businesses like mine can see no benefit whatsoever to changing to Vista, I'm stunned that they didn't bury this story as deep as they could. There's something seriously wrong with a company that believes it's own hype to this extent.
You are allowed to put out your own tape, and you are allowed to make tarps that dont need tape too. The thing you can't do is sell your tape unreasonably cheaply by subsidising the cost of developing and manufacturing your tape with the profits from your monopoly on tarps. If you include the tape by default, you are gaining a monopoly in tarp-tape by leveraging your monopoly in tarps, because the cost of your tape is built-in to the cost of the tarp. If your tarp-tape is any good, you should be able to rely on brand loyalty and your tape-making skills to sell it.
If you owned both markets, you have strong financial incentives to sell tarps with worse holes, tape that needs replacing often, and even to invent new problems in your next tarp which require another expensive fix, which (if you dig into your war chest a bit) you can own the market for too.
Following your analogy, changing to making tarps without holes would be legal, but giving away tape until the tape makers all go bust isn't. The reason it's not legal is that you could then charge a fortune for tape once you own the sole supply.
This is exactly what mircosoft are doing, giving away security software until all the other makers die off. It would be prefectly legal for them to sell their security software seperately at a reasonable price, what they cant legally do is subsidise the security software with profits from Windows.
The reason it can't be legal to do this is because once you have a monopoly on tarps and tape, you could use your increased size to corner the market in more and more products, and eventually own everything, or gain control of something then raise the price to ridiculous levels.
I think I speak for a lot of Europeans when I say...
AAAAAAAAAARRRRGH when's it coming out over here?
Here in Britain, Sony have already admitted they prefer selling to the rest of the world, and won't let us have any until after the Christmas sales rush, which has pissed off a LOT of gamers.
The big question here is will Nintendo also treat us like second-class citizens and hand the British games market to MS on a plate by giving them a second uncontested Christmas?
The EU doesn't 'want' anything. All this is about is making MS follow the same law that every company and citizen of the EU has to follow, a law which boils down to "If you happen to have a monopoly in one product, you cannot use that monopoly position to gain an unfair advantage in other areas."
Microsoft have consistently broken this law an many fields, and the EU justice system has been amazingly lenient with the company for many years.
Since when are moons and asteroids without names included in the list of planets?
...as it says in the linked article!
Thursday August 24th 2006
This joke appeared on he UK tv show "Spitting Image" in the late 1980s, around the time the astronomical community was actually trying to get us to pronounce it 'ooranus' as opposed you 'your-anus'.
A newscaster (Sir Alistair Campbell if memory serves me correctly) was shown announcing the name change to "boo-mo-lay', followed after a second or so by a picture of the planet, captioned "Bumhole".
I laughed a lot... but in my defence I was about 13 years old at the time.
Nobody has to check against these databases at all.
The options for bulk mailers are:
1) Check against them
2) Only mail people who have opted in
or best of all
3) Don't send adult-oriented spam at all.
It's not no beverages, it's no carry on beverages. From watching the BBC news channel, I gather the attackers planned to use 2 or more liquids that were individually safe, possibly in drinks bottles, then meet up and mix them to form something explosive when they were on the plane and in the air. This explains why you can put things in the hold, but not carry them as hand luggage. Any chemists out there care to tell us how plausible this idea is?
Contrary to popular Slashdotter belief, the UK security forces are actually very good at stopping terrorists, the wealthy (US-funded) IRA were foiled again and again during their long terror campaign over here.