The problem at Nokia is that the CEO only realised the company is in trouble very recently, when the signs have been clearly visible for years.
Ask the average man in the street to name any current Nokia product, any feature that only Nokia phones have, or anything that Nokia phones are particularly good at, and you'll get blank looks. Every single Apple phone launch has been a bigger media event than every Nokia launch in the history of the company put together. Fundamentally, mobile phones are a product with low brand loyalty, and high brand disloyalty (If you've owned a few different brands, you'll probably have said 'I'll never buy one of those again' about at least one brand). Newer entrants into the phone market (RIM, Apple, HTC) seem to have no problem getting very very big, very very quickly. Why? Because they have a unique selling point, and memorable, aspirational products, while the big manufacturers are just coasting along with a confusing mass of products that consumers don't aspire to own.
Sensible investors will have jumped a long time ago.
If they record all browsing habits, then by definition they are copying from other search engines. The ethical thing to do would have been to respect google.com's robots.txt and exclude google results from being harvested by their spyware - but of course this would have rendered the technique practically useless.
The idea that it's permissable to copy Google's results because a third party sent them the results is quite frankly, laughable. Would Microsoft be happy for me to copy it's products just because a third party said I could?
Part of the problem in this particular case was that these cases couldn't be defended against, since the accusers didn't actually take the cases to court, preferring instead to send more threats, or just move on to the next potential victim leaving the threat hanging. The hearing in the article was the first time a judge ever saw a contested ACS:law filesharing case, and even then ACS tried (unsuccessfully) to drop all the cases before the the court date.
There's always was a blindingly obvious path to profitability for Myspace.
They have a million unsigned bands, and they know *exactly* who the fans of those bands are. If they simply put two and two together and sold music to the fans, they would suddenly have a business model.
They didn't just have the potential to be Facebook and blew it, they also had the potential to be iTunes and they blew that too.
If I was a venture capitalist with a couple of hundred million spare, I'd buy the collapsing shells of EMI and Myspace, and merge them.
This dumb-seeming idea is potentially a great way of getting those people who are still susceptible to advertising to stick their hands up and shout 'hey, advertisers, over here'. That's it's actual value, it potentially allows targetting of ad spending on people who don't adblock.
Scott 'dilbert' Adams pointed out a while ago that the holy grail for advertisers is an accurate list of people who are gullible, rich and not resistant to ads. He uses the example of a absurdly expensive house-cozy (like a tea cozy, but for your house). It's so stupid and over-priced that only a handful of people in the whole would be rich and dumb enough to buy one, so it's an awful idea for a business... unless you know exactly who those handful people are. If you do then then you have a workable business model.
Indeed... while other O:P people have said they would stop.
The end result is that politicians of other parties will be less able to confuse O:P with the PP, and less able to dismiss the PP as rogue lawbreakers, since the PP can truthfull say they did more than anyone else to try and get O:P to behave lawfully.
My guess (and it is just a guess) is that a settlement for an undisclosed sum with Microsoft is beneficial for both sides, if that sum is in the region of $1.
Microsoft gets a potential expensive irritant go away and sue their competitors instead, and the troll gets to scare people by saying 'Microsoft folded, so you should too' to everyone else.
It all really depends what the owners of the websites you visit do when the guy in the italian suit says 'nice website you've got here, it would be a shame if burnt dow... er... if all the packets got dropped, know what I mean? Me and my 'associates' can here make sure that doesn't happen, can't we Guiseppe? How does £50k a month sound."
In Britain, it's actually life + 70 + next January the 1st. Obviously this makes perfect sense, we clearly need to penalise those dead creatives who make the silly mistake of dying near the end of the year by giving them less protection.
By the way, if life + 70 + next January 1st isn't enough for you, just use the Silmarillion loophole... name some much younger people as co-authors. Even if they didn't do anything at all, as long as you say they did, your protection will extend to the date of the last one of them to die + 70 + next January 1st.
Unless we get this ass of a law fixed before then, that is...
This might seem a bit odd coming from a Pirate politician who stood against them at the last election, but I'm actually quite positive about the coalition. I've met and debated with quite a few MPs, and with a few notable exceptions (on all sides), I've been unimpressed with the 'old guard'. The expenses scandal cleared a lot of them out, and all the 'new intake' MPs that I've met so far have struck me as clever, honest and dedicated people who are sincere, surprisingly open minded about policies, and genuinely want to 'do the right thing'.
Leader of Pirate Party UK reveals that he wasn't actually trying to get publicity, he was just answering a journalist's question about the possibility of the UK party following the Swedish party's lead and setting up their own ISP. Out of all the countless quotes he's given to journalists over the last year, he's actually quite surprised that this one made it to the front page of Slashdot.
If you allow unusual interpretations of conversational English, you would need more qualifications than simply specifying that one and only one is a boy born on Tuesday. You would also need to specify that the questioner has two and only two children, that questioner is not a bee (and therefore highly unlikely to have a 50:50 male to female ratio of offspring), and so on. If you can write the problem in English covering all such possible misinterpetations, I have some bad news for you: you have a promising career in contract law ahead of you.
...and I was just posting to get rid of modpoints. I was sooooo tempted to pick the questions I most wanted to answer. Hmm, I wonder if there's an unlockable achievement for rigging your own interview?
I disagree, it's in nobody's interest that bandwidth and electricity gets wasted sending you an advert that you will never see. While it might make financial sense, the site is charging the advertiser for a 'view' they are not getting, and the advertiser is given no feedback that their behaviour is considered unwelcome by you.
I think the real problem is that advertisers do not see the value in targetting adverts at just those people who will not be annoyed by them. Consider these two scenarios:
1) For $x we will show your advert to 100,000 people, y% of whom will have negative feelings about you and your company, because the consider your advert is degrading their browsing experience. 2) For $x we will show your advert to 100,000 - y% people, all of whom who are known not object to seeing adverts enough to install blocking software.
The advertiser is clearly a better off in scenario 2. It is clearly also in the advertiser's interest not to behave in a way that increases the value of y. If everyone looked at things that way, and valued the technical abilities of Ars users to correctly place themselves in the y group rather than wanting to block ads but being unable to, then we'd be a big step closer to ending the advertiser vs user war.
Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. We don't have the funding to run more than a handful of Pirate candidates at the upcoming election. There's a £500 fee to get a name on the ballot paper, and running a campaign on an absolute shoestring budget adds another thousand to that.
You can help though, through donations, membership fees, and if you really care about this and have the cash to spend, by standing under the pirate banner yourself.
It's certainly the issue that get us the most publicity, but as party leader, I'd be much much happier if the Pirate Party UK helped to change the bill for the better.
There are some insanely draconian powers in the bill as it currently stands, it sidesteps the right to a fair trial, and the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. It also makes the owner of a wifi access point punishable for allegations of copyright infringement, rather than being considered a common carrier, which will mean the end of free wifi in the UK.
That's not as problem if the gun fires things straight up into a geosynchronous orbit, since the projectile reaches the furthest point on the ellipse then stays there, and for other orbits aerodynamic drag can be used in the lower atmosphere to steer the projectile onto a more useful trajectory.
The really sad thing is that if they had simply added some cars and high res'd some graphics, I'd have bought a PS3 on launch day just to play it, and this would be a post about how I'm willing to wait for GT6, not one about pointing out to Sony that no matter how good the game is, I've already got a Wii and and Xbox360 plugged into my TV downstairs, so it's always going to be too little too late.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem at Nokia is that the CEO only realised the company is in trouble very recently, when the signs have been clearly visible for years.
Ask the average man in the street to name any current Nokia product, any feature that only Nokia phones have, or anything that Nokia phones are particularly good at, and you'll get blank looks. Every single Apple phone launch has been a bigger media event than every Nokia launch in the history of the company put together. Fundamentally, mobile phones are a product with low brand loyalty, and high brand disloyalty (If you've owned a few different brands, you'll probably have said 'I'll never buy one of those again' about at least one brand). Newer entrants into the phone market (RIM, Apple, HTC) seem to have no problem getting very very big, very very quickly. Why? Because they have a unique selling point, and memorable, aspirational products, while the big manufacturers are just coasting along with a confusing mass of products that consumers don't aspire to own.
Sensible investors will have jumped a long time ago.
If they record all browsing habits, then by definition they are copying from other search engines. The ethical thing to do would have been to respect google.com's robots.txt and exclude google results from being harvested by their spyware - but of course this would have rendered the technique practically useless.
The idea that it's permissable to copy Google's results because a third party sent them the results is quite frankly, laughable. Would Microsoft be happy for me to copy it's products just because a third party said I could?
Part of the problem in this particular case was that these cases couldn't be defended against, since the accusers didn't actually take the cases to court, preferring instead to send more threats, or just move on to the next potential victim leaving the threat hanging. The hearing in the article was the first time a judge ever saw a contested ACS:law filesharing case, and even then ACS tried (unsuccessfully) to drop all the cases before the the court date.
There's always was a blindingly obvious path to profitability for Myspace.
They have a million unsigned bands, and they know *exactly* who the fans of those bands are. If they simply put two and two together and sold music to the fans, they would suddenly have a business model.
They didn't just have the potential to be Facebook and blew it, they also had the potential to be iTunes and they blew that too.
If I was a venture capitalist with a couple of hundred million spare, I'd buy the collapsing shells of EMI and Myspace, and merge them.
This dumb-seeming idea is potentially a great way of getting those people who are still susceptible to advertising to stick their hands up and shout 'hey, advertisers, over here'. That's it's actual value, it potentially allows targetting of ad spending on people who don't adblock.
Scott 'dilbert' Adams pointed out a while ago that the holy grail for advertisers is an accurate list of people who are gullible, rich and not resistant to ads. He uses the example of a absurdly expensive house-cozy (like a tea cozy, but for your house). It's so stupid and over-priced that only a handful of people in the whole would be rich and dumb enough to buy one, so it's an awful idea for a business... unless you know exactly who those handful people are. If you do then then you have a workable business model.
The good news is that patents last 20 years, so everything that 1991 camera did should be fair game in a few months.
Indeed... while other O:P people have said they would stop.
The end result is that politicians of other parties will be less able to confuse O:P with the PP, and less able to dismiss the PP as rogue lawbreakers, since the PP can truthfull say they did more than anyone else to try and get O:P to behave lawfully.
My guess (and it is just a guess) is that a settlement for an undisclosed sum with Microsoft is beneficial for both sides, if that sum is in the region of $1.
Microsoft gets a potential expensive irritant go away and sue their competitors instead, and the troll gets to scare people by saying 'Microsoft folded, so you should too' to everyone else.
It all really depends what the owners of the websites you visit do when the guy in the italian suit says 'nice website you've got here, it would be a shame if burnt dow... er... if all the packets got dropped, know what I mean? Me and my 'associates' can here make sure that doesn't happen, can't we Guiseppe? How does £50k a month sound."
In Britain, it's actually life + 70 + next January the 1st. Obviously this makes perfect sense, we clearly need to penalise those dead creatives who make the silly mistake of dying near the end of the year by giving them less protection.
By the way, if life + 70 + next January 1st isn't enough for you, just use the Silmarillion loophole... name some much younger people as co-authors. Even if they didn't do anything at all, as long as you say they did, your protection will extend to the date of the last one of them to die + 70 + next January 1st.
Unless we get this ass of a law fixed before then, that is...
This might seem a bit odd coming from a Pirate politician who stood against them at the last election, but I'm actually quite positive about the coalition. I've met and debated with quite a few MPs, and with a few notable exceptions (on all sides), I've been unimpressed with the 'old guard'. The expenses scandal cleared a lot of them out, and all the 'new intake' MPs that I've met so far have struck me as clever, honest and dedicated people who are sincere, surprisingly open minded about policies, and genuinely want to 'do the right thing'.
Leader of Pirate Party UK reveals that he wasn't actually trying to get publicity, he was just answering a journalist's question about the possibility of the UK party following the Swedish party's lead and setting up their own ISP. Out of all the countless quotes he's given to journalists over the last year, he's actually quite surprised that this one made it to the front page of Slashdot.
If you allow unusual interpretations of conversational English, you would need more qualifications than simply specifying that one and only one is a boy born on Tuesday. You would also need to specify that the questioner has two and only two children, that questioner is not a bee (and therefore highly unlikely to have a 50:50 male to female ratio of offspring), and so on. If you can write the problem in English covering all such possible misinterpetations, I have some bad news for you: you have a promising career in contract law ahead of you.
The renumber command was great until you came across a computed GOTO. Nothing quite prepares you for the horror of menu code like this:
10 Input A
20 Goto A * 50
Especially when one of the options doesn't fit into 50 unrenumberable lines and you find code like this
10 Input A
20 If A=7 THEN GOTO 1537 ELSE GOTO A*50
...and I was just posting to get rid of modpoints. I was sooooo tempted to pick the questions I most wanted to answer. Hmm, I wonder if there's an unlockable achievement for rigging your own interview?
Hey, he asked me, not you :-)
I disagree, it's in nobody's interest that bandwidth and electricity gets wasted sending you an advert that you will never see. While it might make financial sense, the site is charging the advertiser for a 'view' they are not getting, and the advertiser is given no feedback that their behaviour is considered unwelcome by you.
I think the real problem is that advertisers do not see the value in targetting adverts at just those people who will not be annoyed by them. Consider these two scenarios:
1) For $x we will show your advert to 100,000 people, y% of whom will have negative feelings about you and your company, because the consider your advert is degrading their browsing experience.
2) For $x we will show your advert to 100,000 - y% people, all of whom who are known not object to seeing adverts enough to install blocking software.
The advertiser is clearly a better off in scenario 2. It is clearly also in the advertiser's interest not to behave in a way that increases the value of y. If everyone looked at things that way, and valued the technical abilities of Ars users to correctly place themselves in the y group rather than wanting to block ads but being unable to, then we'd be a big step closer to ending the advertiser vs user war.
Lord Clement Jones "is paid £70,000 in respect of his services as Co-Chairman of DLA Piper's global government relations practice" according to http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld/ldreg/reg06.htm
DLA Piper works on behalf of the MusicFIRST coalition.
The RIAA is a founding member of the MusicFIRST coalition.
Yes.
- Andrew Robinson, party leader, Pirate Party UK.
(hey look, politicians can give a straightforward yes or no answer... when the slashdot filter lets them).
Unfortunately, the answer is probably no. We don't have the funding to run more than a handful of Pirate candidates at the upcoming election. There's a £500 fee to get a name on the ballot paper, and running a campaign on an absolute shoestring budget adds another thousand to that.
You can help though, through donations, membership fees, and if you really care about this and have the cash to spend, by standing under the pirate banner yourself.
It's certainly the issue that get us the most publicity, but as party leader, I'd be much much happier if the Pirate Party UK helped to change the bill for the better.
There are some insanely draconian powers in the bill as it currently stands, it sidesteps the right to a fair trial, and the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. It also makes the owner of a wifi access point punishable for allegations of copyright infringement, rather than being considered a common carrier, which will mean the end of free wifi in the UK.
That's not as problem if the gun fires things straight up into a geosynchronous orbit, since the projectile reaches the furthest point on the ellipse then stays there, and for other orbits aerodynamic drag can be used in the lower atmosphere to steer the projectile onto a more useful trajectory.
The really sad thing is that if they had simply added some cars and high res'd some graphics, I'd have bought a PS3 on launch day just to play it, and this would be a post about how I'm willing to wait for GT6, not one about pointing out to Sony that no matter how good the game is, I've already got a Wii and and Xbox360 plugged into my TV downstairs, so it's always going to be too little too late.
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=tianamen+square+massacre currently gives 1,350,000 results. If it's also doing that on the other side of the great firewall of China, then they have already done something BIG.
I think 38 years should be long enough for us to sort things out before Y2K.