Of course, if you want to ensure that the optical links between your devices are more secure, you could try networking your room with a collection of long, thin, hollow, flexible cylindrical light-guards. A system of tubes, if you will.
Also, at some point this year Google are due to launch//their// online ebook store.
Not sure if there are any advance details yet, though. I think they announced it last year, and with the Nexus launch they've now got their toe-in-the-water online merchant stuff set up, so now I guess they have to graft a set of eBook databases onto the back of it and get the publisher permissions.
They can probably pick up a lot of passing trade by making the public-domain chunk of their library downloadable.
Erm, no. It's been Steve Job's and Apple's stance for a long time that DRM is a bad thing, even before Amazon sold music.
Lots of iPod owners are students who simply won't buy DRM'ed music when they can download non-DRMed material from bittorrent. If all iTunes music was DRM, they woudln't get any iTunes sales from those owners. That's why Jobs takes a public stance on his being against DRM.
For just about everything else, Jobs is an almost total control freak regarding what you're allowed to do with your devices and your data. If you're a shop, and you want to install OSX (which you've bought) on non-Apple hardware, you get sued. You buy an iPod Touch, and the thing comes from the shop in a pre-bricked state, it can't even get to its startup screen until it's been activated by plugging it into iTunes. They want you to buy from iTunes so badly that you aren't allowed to use the hardware at all until iTunes is fully installed on your computer.
That's not Hollywood's fault, that's Jobs.
The iPad has to function as a reader, so it allows you to load up a number of different filetypes onto the device, including MSWord, RTF, PDF and so on.
On the iPhone, all those file extensions are blocked. Even if you have a third-party app that can display them, you can't put your own document files onto the device from your computer, unless you circumvent the iTunes synch software by signing up with a fileserver service and going via the internet... just to get around the Apple restrictions.
Even//text files// are blocked from being transferred across. That's not Hollywood or CBS records. That's Jobs' work. Got an Apple bluetooth keyboard? Want to use it with your Apple bluetooth iPod? Tough. They don't want to undercut laptop sales. The hardware has an FM radio onboard, but it's unsupported, because if you could listen to the radio on your iPod Touch, the radio station would get the advertising revenue rather than Apple.
Pretty much Apple's entire business model is now focused on narrowly restricting what people can do with their hardware and software. If iTunes has a DRM-free premium shop, then that's great, but don't kid yourself that it's a sign that Apple's cultural values make them in favour of people being allowed to do what they want with the software and hardware they've paid for. Maybe they used to think like that once, but nowadays its just a sales slogan.
When's the last tme you tried to order an expensive book from a bookshop, cash in advance, and the shop owner said, "No, I'm sorry, we won't take your order because we refuse to deal with that publisher, because we think that their books cost the customer too much money" ?
There's a range of legitimate reasons why a bookshop might refuse to take orders for a book, but this isn't one of them. A bookshop's core business is supposed to be selling books. If it lets its other commercial interests damage its ability to carry out that core function, then it stops being seen by its customers as an honest vendor, and it loses customer loyalty.
The more that amazon are perceived as being "anti-publisher", the more publishers will want to base their future ebook strategies on having as little reliance on amazon as possible.
Amazon could get away with behaving like arses when the Kindle was a dominant platform, but when the 2010 tablet netbook models appear, and the iPad ships, and Apple's iTunes book sales kick in, and Google launch their eBook shop... the amazon/Kindle convergence doesn't look so powerful.
Compare the Kindle to an Ubuntu-powered colour tablet netbook that displays ANY eBook from ANY source, holds your entire MP3 collection, plugs into your digital camera, works as a digital picture frame, has an onboard webcam, functions as a skype terminal, lets you write reports and edit your shopping list, and browse the internet and glossy colour content via wifi, lets you plug in a cheap external DVD writer to watch your movies and backup your data, and isn't locked to a single telecom provider.
Amazon have a huge presence as a store, but Apple already have a lot of "premium" cutomers, and Google have so much customer goodwill that their store could get huge very quickly if they don't screw it up (they screwed the pooch a bit with publishers with their Google Books mismarketing, but everyone else still likes them). If amazon stay aggressively focussed on just the Kindle, and Apple and Google are seen as carrying more formats and more content, then suddenly amazon aren't the premiere "go-to" eBook store any more.
It's going to be an interesting eight months. Will amazon start selling Kindles at cost? How many do they have in the warehouse? I just wish that we had real-time product sales information so that we could track exactly what's happening in the market right now, the week-by-week sales figures for all these mobile devices must be gripping reading.
FYI, on the iPod Touch, bluetooth isn't what a slashdotter would consider to be "proper" bluetooth... it only seems to be enabled for letting you play audio through a pair of wireless bluetooth headphones. You don't seem to be able to use it for conventional file transfers. You can recognise other bluetooth devices and connect, but apparently nothing else, unless its an "allowed" peripheral.
For instance, you know that fun app that lets users exchange business cards by bumping fists? AFAIK, that's not actually a bluetooth app. To get it to work, the "bump" software company has had to set up an internet server that people can subscribe to in advance, the bump application sends a bump signal over the internet to the server when the accelerometer yelps, and the server works out which pair of worldwide devices are bumping at the same time, so that it can take the business card data from the two subscribers and zap it back to the other (over their net connection?).
They had to jump through hoops to make it//look// like a bluetooth or IR transfer, but AFAIK, it's all internet (someone correct me if I've got this wrong).
If//this// device is the same, then (apart from the possibility of now allowing an Apple bluetooth keyboard) we'd seem to be just talking about wifi and the 3G option as data connectivity options.
Yep, it's essentially a big iPod touch with some of the more Stalinist restrictions of the iPT rolled back a little, so that it can be more useful as a document viewer.
For instance, the list of files that you could put onto your iPod Touch via the USB cable was kinda minimal.
No "office" documents to speak of, no spreadsheets, no wordprocessor files, no html files, no PDF files. Sure, you could install "apps for that", but they'd have to get their source document files from the internet, because Apple's gatekeeper sync application would block those file types from being loaded onto the device's internal storage via USB, even if you had an app that could display them. The bluetooth was crippled so you couldn't get your files on by bluetooth, and there wasn't a card slot to get them on that way. So if you wanted to transfer a draft PDF brochure or itinerary onto your iPT, you normally had to do it by loading it onto an internet server and downloading it into the iPT off the net. Or by the back door using Google Docs or Zoho or some other "cloudish" software.
Apple basically went out of their way to make sure that there was no way for the user to have a free choice of what they loaded onto the iPT, short of jailbreaking it. You couldn't even use the Apple bluetooth keyboard with it, because that'd have undercut their laptop sales, so the sorts of peripheral choices you had with the Palm Pilot in the 1990s (remember those cute pocket-size folding keyboards?) were "verboten" for the iPhone.
With the new iPad, things aren't quite so bad. Apple now graciously gives you permission to load your MSOffice files onto the device, along with PDFs. Not OpenOffice files, though, or any other unrecognised file types. You will apparently be allowed to use an external keyboard with it, which is an advance, but that keyboard will probably have to be made by Apple. And hopefully they'll have sorted some of the limitations of the iPT that stopped it being any good as a PDA unless you were synching over wifi to an internet server. Maybe give it a native "ToDo" manager, the native ability to create contact list categories, stuff like that.
But basically, yes, it's a big iPod Touch with a few less limitations. Still gated for most data types, but now allowed to transfer at least//some// ebook formats under iTunes control (although AFAIK we're still waiting to see if it'll support ==all== common eBook formats, or just the ones that Apple will be selling via their shop). It still only seems to have one button, though (sigh. Apple.)
Personally, I think the iPad is still much too restrictive, and I'm planning on waiting for an ASUS EeePad instead.
I want to be able to store any files I want, I want proper working bluetooth and peripherals, I want to be able to run any class of software I choose. I'd quite like the option of installing Ubuntu if the bundled OS doesn't suit me, and I'd like an SD card to allow me to quickly shunt files between machines, and probably also USB, so I could use it with a cheap external keyboard or peripherals like scanners and TV tuners.
Basically I'd like a full-blown slate-format version of a netbook, something that'd let me edit and reorganise files on the device itself, rather than just being a dumb satellite device like the iPT, that relies on a parent device to do all its file organisation for it.
Ideally, some sort of additional front-panel or edge-mounted navigation hardware would be useful, with a raised "feel" (unlike the Apple's single recessed "home" button)... five buttons like the Palm organisers, or a scroll wheel or up-down buttons - something that'd let me jump straight to a few major applications and functions, and maybe page through files without having to use the touchscreen. Some people would also want an inbuilt webcam, for use with Skype.
IMO, the device doesn't have to be dirt-cheap, but it has to be flexible, and for me, the Apple device just doesn't have the flexibility that I'd want if I was going to b
Yeah, imagine if you live somewhere like the Outer Hebrides, and you buy a game for a bit of escapism, and you find that it auto-localises so that Grand Theft Auto is now set in... the Outer Hebrides.
I'd be interested to see what Skype looks like in portrait mode on some of the forthcoming tablet PCs.
I keep remembering that videoconferencing scene in Demolition Man, with the conference table surrounded by motorised portrait-mode screens. I think it'd be funny to have conferences where a missing member attended by Skype, and had a personal assistant assigned to wave their screen-camera around in an interested way to point at whoever was talking.
With a few absentees it'd start to look like Japanese mime or puppet theatre. You could have the operators wearing black ninja costumes to blend into the background. It could get surreal.
If your apartment had a pneumatic tube point, you could order a pizza online, and the pizza place could roll it up and stuff it into a canister, and it could arrive minutes later! Wheee!
So Google just announced their unlocked smartphone before Apple can announce what they're going to do with the iPhone (wonder how badly top-line iPhone sales have paused while people wait for the Nexus specs?), MS appear to be about to announce a slate-type device on the ~6th before Apple can announce their (hypothetical) device... Apple must be feeling like everyone's ganging up on them to rob them of things to announce.
I wonder how many days left 'til ASUS announce the spec and launch date of their new EeePad (undermining the iPod Touch)?
I suppose Apple might launch an iTunes-based movie distribution channel, but there's still a chance that Sony or Sky might have something up their sleeve...
If you're going to have a guy in police/army uniform with a gun on each flight, then you're going to have to recruit a lot of guys with guns.
I suppose that the ideal candidate would be someone with army training, who's been taught how to deal with terrorists, and who ideally has psychology training so that he knows what to look out for. So maybe the perfect candidate would be an army psychologist with weapons training, perhaps one who'd be happy to take the airline posting rather than go to Iraq?
In which case, after your recruitment drive, you'd find that amongst your hundreds of new air staff, you'd have employed this guy.
I'd distinguish between at least three major human indicator traits, just to start with: cleverness, brightness and smartness (and that's before you start specifying other traits like artistic ability, ability to make inspired "leaps", aesthetic sense, creativity, empathic ability, and so on).
The rule of thumb is: if you think that "intelligence" is important, but you don't know the difference between "clever" and "bright", then you're probably not that bright (although you may well be clever).
"Clever but not bright" people tend to fixate on rigid systems of measurable quantities, rigid official definitions and correct solutions. They're the intellectual equivalent of racehorses - put them on a track with a defined goal and they'll beat all-comers, but put them out in the wider world to problem-solve, and they're liable to starve to death when something unexpected happens.
The subject of IQ tends to attract people who are quite driven, and perhaps quite clever, but often not all that bright. Bright people would tend to query the basic validity of the IQ metrics, realise the problems, and decide that since the field was so dodgy they'd rather go into some other, more respectable branch of science. So as a result, a disproportionate amount of work on intelligence is junk science, because by default, it's usually done by people who are just that little bit dim, and either don't see the problems or don't care.
Another worry is that any time the BBC appears to be stepping away from its public service remit, there are people who will try to leverage that and use it against them.
See, if I was Rupert Murdoch, I'd want Ofcom to agree to the BBC's request. I'd want the Beeb to standardise a DRM copy-protect system and insist that it appeared on all next-generation Freeview boxes. It'd help make Sky's DRM seem less obtrusive. Me-Murdoch would then want the triumphant BBC-HD people to run with their new DRM system to the Hollywood studios, and buy first-broadcast rights to a few really big high-profile movies, to launch the channel (which is probably the real reason why the BBC-HD guys wanted the feature, to make those sorts of negotiations easier).
And then, me-Murdoch would strike. I'd announce that the BBC was an out of control monster, that it was Sky who was the real innovator that had invested heavily in bringing HD to the public, I'd point out that since the Beeb had implemented DRM, there wasn't much to differentiate between what they were doing and what Sky were doing, except that the BBC channel had the unfair advantage of being funded by licence-fee payers who didn't have a choice.
I'd argue that with BBC-HD, the management had finally shown their true colours and abandoned their public-service principles, that their request to Ofcom meant that they accepted that they were working outside their remit, and that their HD channel was therefore a sign of the megalomania of the BBC board to have a successful movie channel showing blockbuster Hollywood imports, rather than being a legitimate use of the licence fee. They were going after Sky's market, and wasting licence fee money, partly paid by Sky subscribers (who didn't have a choice) to fund it. If the BBC was going to operate within the restrictions of its charter then that was one thing, but if it was going to divert money from homegrown talent to Hollywood megamovies, go after Sky's market, and ignore any charter obligations that might hold it back, then BBC-HD was operating unfairly against competition law, and against it own charter, and spending money in ways that to had no right to, in an attempt to disrupt a "proper" commercial channel. The evidence would be difficult to argue with.
Me-Murdoch would demand that BBC HD to be shut down or sold off as a commercial venture to sink or swim in the commercial market without help, and would then lobby MP's and make sure that all my newspapers carried editorials and stories campaigning against the high licence fee and BBC waste, and agreeing with my argument. The BBC had abandoned its principles! The board should be sacked! I'd also make it be known that if this wasn't going to happen, then at the very least I'd want some sort of equitable compensation, perhaps a chunk of the licence fee money could go to Sky to pay for the Sky news channel (which is available on Freeview), or some sort of rebate on the licence fee could be organised for Sky subscribers (or given direct to Sky on their behalf), and/or some new budgetary or legal restrictions set up limiting what the BBC could and couldn't do.
And if all this was scheduled to happen after the election, then if the Conservatives won, there might be a decent chance of Murdoch getting it to work.
If Murdoch then wanted to buy a DRM-enabled terrestrial HD broadcast system dirt cheap, and use it as a feeder system to channel users towards Sky HD, he'd have the opportunity. If he didn't want it, he could stand back and watch it be shut down for lack of buyers, and simply enjoy the fact that he'd destroyed a potential competing channel anf damaged the BBc into the bargain. Win-win!
So if Ofcom had allowed the BBC request, Murdoch would have been given a really strong financial incentive to have his media network throw its weight strongly behind the Conservative party winning the next election.
I guess the BBC technical guys probably don't realise that what they just did by asking Ofcom for that special permission nearly set up a disastrous chain of events that could not only have destroyed the BBC-HD channel and crippled the BBC, it might also have been instrumental in swinging the next UK general election.
If we're talking English-language discs, distributed worldwide, and we take just the two major English-only regions (UK and US), then with two regions, two formats (DVD and BluRay, and those three titles, that means we have twelve potential products here whose sales might be undermined by people home-recording unencrypted HD broadcasts and saving to Bluray discs.
Lets overlook the fact that you can already home-record standard-definition Freeview broadcasts and save them to recordable DVD, and the fact that that hasn't eliminated DVD sales.
How badly are these twelve products being affected by home copying?
title #1, Small Island
There's currently no UK DVD or BluRay DVD of Small Island. You can't buy it in the shops, and you can't pre-order it. There's no release date, and (AFAIK) no indication from the BBC that it'll ever be available on disc, on any format. What I did find from a Google search was that there are lots of people online who like the series, plaintively asking if anybody knows when they might please be able to give someone their money and buy a copy, because the BBC can't give them any information about availability.
So as far as Small Island is concerned, yes there IS a serious problem wrecking its DVD/BluRay sales, but its not piracy, it's the distributor... there isn't any legal product available that piracy could undercut.
Small Island was much-anticipated, and delayed. Its first episode got five million viewers, beating ITV1's premiere showing of Batman Begins. There are people desperate to buy it.
Adding Freeview HD DRM here wouldn't have helped. All it would have done would be to further antagonise the viewers who the BBC were refusing to sell legit copies to.
I'm sure that if they finally bring the thing out on disc, after a year they'll look at the sales and someone will ask why the DVD sales figures were so disappointing for something that was so well received, and someone from BBC Worldwide will shake their head sadly and say, well, you know, piracy... it was on BBC HD without DRM... we kinda expected it... ... But the truth is their sales will be lower than they should have been because during the entire period when the series was getting great reviews and being heavily promoted, they had no product to sell, nothing to take advance orders for, and no information for retailers or customers for when (or if) any such product might be available.
If you don't win the lottery, and you didn't buy a ticket, it's not the fault of pirates.
Title #2, Sharpe's Peril (2008)
This is now available in the UK, but the UK release is region-flagged "region 2", so it's not supposed to be sold in the US except as a special import. If you're in the US, you're not really supposed to buy the UK discs, you're supposed to only buy the "proper", legit, region 1 disks (grey importing being regarded by the industry as only slightly less bad then piracy). Trouble is, they've apparently not yet gotten around to actually making any of those region 1 disks of Sharpe's Peril yet, even though the thing was broadcast over a year ago, back in 2008. The good news is, you can now order a "region 1" copy of Sharpe's Peril online. The bad news is, you'll still have to wait until the second quarter of 2010 for delivery.
Gee, I wonder why their worldwide disc sales aren't as good as they might have been? Could the fact that they've not yet been able to deliver a single legal region 1 disk to any customer perhaps be contributing to the lack of a "buzz" amongst US customers?
Title #3, Day of the Triffids
Your third example, "Day of the Triffids" (2009) also isn't available on disc. In this case it's understandable, because the thing doesn't start being broadcast until Monday December 28th, but even after it starts being broadcast, you won't be able to buy it on disc straight away. If you're worried about missing an episode, you'll h
You're right about the "corporation" bit. Under English law, a "corporation" is "an artificial human being" ("corp..." referring to things bodylike), so the BBC as a corporation is singular whenever we're talking about a matter of centralised policy (whenever the BBC is acting as a single entity).
However, there are many groups within the BBC in charge of different aspects of policymaking (such as the technical and standards groups), so "The BBC" can also be considered as a group, and when one of these groups does a thing, or floats an idea that can't be treated as a definitive official action by the corporation, we tend to use the plural (plurals sometimes being used to symbolise "fuzziness", to signify vagueness over who exactly it is that's being referred to).
"The BBC" can also be plural when it refers to a group of broadcast channels.
So for instance you might hear people saying:
The BBC is/are showing a new Doctor Who episode over Christmas.
("Is"="BBC as a single entity", "are" = the collective group of BBC channels)
BBC1 is showing the Christmas Special.
The BBC are also going to be showing other repeated Doctor Who material this Christmas (on multiple/unspecified channels).
The BBC is the rightsholder for Doctor Who.
The BBC has a popular website.
The BBC has a decent reputation for newsgathering.
(Elements within) the BBC are considering X.
The BBC has decided as a matter of (official, press-released) policy to standardise on X.
PS: On the "corporation" bit, that's what niggled me about Asimov's "I Robot" series... the ongoing plot element about the robot wanting to have status as a person. I don't see why they couldn't simply have had him registered as a corporation. Corporations have reponsibilities and can be deemed to have committed crimes (eg corporate manslaughter), they can own property, and they can be subjected to penalties, like people. If you want to deem a sentient robot to be an autonomous entity, then declaring them an "artificial person" seems appropriate.
That's right, the business with Americans' prolific use of z's seems to be a holdover from an alternative spelling convention that dates back to before English was properly standardised (Note: "standardised", not "standarized").
Californian "Valley Talk" in particular seem to have strong elements of late Seventeenth/early Eighteenth century spoken English, notably the "delayed negative" that's often used for humour or emphasis (this is well known... not).
This anachronistic anomaly may be due to the comparatively high proportion of vampires that left Europe for the New World to avoid persecution at around the time of the Founding Fathers, and who kept migrating West until they ended up concentrated in small communities in California.
It'd also be nice is certain scientists could get as clue about how the thought-processes of the general population really work, before they start trying to change public opinion.
IMO, significant numbers of people first started thinking that global warming was a con at about the same time that some scientists decided that a change in public policy was an overriding necessity, and started exaggerating the case for gw in publlic. They knew that scientifically the case was "strong," but when it came to talking to the public, they set aside the scientific method and started saying that it was a "fact".
And at that point, even people who weren't climatologists, and who were sympathetic to the idea of global warming started to get antsy and suspecting that they were being bullshitted at. Sure, the bullshit was in a good cause, but bullshit is bullshit, and if you catch someone trying to persuade you to do something by bullshitting you, you tend to dig in your heels and refuse. Because people don't like being conned.
Luckily, just when it seemed that the climatologists were going to lose the battle, the US government came to their aid by being caught trying to edit and repress data.
At that point, it stopped being seen as a scientific conspiracy to exaggerate data, and started being seen as a governmental conspiracy to repress data. The scientists turned back into the good guys (or at least, the least worst guys).
What climategate does it to flip the tide back again, by turning the latest news story into one about//scientists'// attempts to suppress data.
This isn't the public's fault. They have people on both sides of the argument trying to con them, and they have no primary way of checking the data themselves. In that situation, the rule of thumb is that whoever seems to be trying to con you the worst is the person you shouldn't listen to.
The scientists should have known that in the current febrile atmosphere, the easiest way to lose the argument was to get caught doing something dishonest. It was absolutely imperative that nobody did anything underhand. And still... they went ahead and did it anyway, and got caught.
So the reasonable public response is to think: if these people were fiddling data even in//this// situation, when they//must// have known it was a dumb idea, then how much else has been fiddled?
Remember, we're living in an age where the assurances of authority figures are increasingly seen as worthless and corrupt and self-serving. When Microsoft tell us that Vista is a great operating system, and the US governemnt tells us that the economy is fine, just before a crash. Where the US military intelligence plans an invasion of Iraq that's staggeringly inept, and tells us that it's going to be a pushover. In which the biggest Wall Street financier turns out to be a con artist, and financial experts turn out to have less understanding of the economy than the local real-estate agent.
It's an age in which we know that//some// experts are lying to us to try to get us to do what they want. The one defence we have (as the general public) against being lied to is that when we catch someone cheating us, we make sure that they don't get what they want. We take the opposite position to the one that the cheater wants us to take. It's a strategy that hopefully makes experts realise that cheating is counterproductive, so tha they hopefully revert to telling us the truth.
And THIS was the environment in which our climatology guys decided that it'd be a good wheeze to take a few liberties with the data. That was really stupid.
Iran once had a comparatively moderate leader (Mossadeq), but when it turned out that Anglo-Persian Oil was robbing the country, Mossadeq responded by nationalising its assets. So the CIA and MI6 helped run a dirty tricks campaign to get rid of Mossadeq, and helped install the pro-West Shah of Iran.
The Iranians then figured that the Shah was a puppet of the West and yet another example of their country being screwed over to suit Western interests, and in the resulting puritan, anti-West, anti-corrpution backlash, they put in Ayatollah Khomeni.:(
So it's not so much that the Iranians don't like freedom, it's more that we confronted them with a stark choice over what sort of freedom they wanted: If they wanted a powerful government who were "clean", and couldn't be bribed or blackmailed or corrupted by foreign powers, the Mullahs were holding themselves forward as the only immediate candidates for the job. So the Iranians gave them a go.
To some Iranians, the US and UK are still the most powerful evil influence that they need to be protected against, and giving up some freedoms to the mullahs is considered the lesser of two evils. The religious government then have an incentive to constantly emphasise how bad the West are, because however bad//they// are, at least they're protecting the Iranians from us. We're the barbarians at the gates, the spectre of the mushroom cloud.
The mullahs argue that if Iranians want to protect their country from foreign evildoers who want to bomb them and destroy their way of life, and who have no concept of human rights or morality, then they have to make certain sacrifices and be prepared to give up certain long-held personal freedoms in order to be strong enough as a country to be victorious over the threat from abroad.
Basically, the Mullahs use the same arguments as George Bush.
Patriotism, destiny, God, freedom, way of life, the threat from outside, the need to keep up a united front against the evil ideology of those who hate us and will never sleep until the country is overthrown (but they will never manage it because they are weak and cowardly and we are stronger, becuase we know that our cause is just)... that sort of thing. Probably plays at least as well in Iran as it does in the US.
The funny thing is, when you look at how some of the Republican Party want to converge Church and State, and what the end result would tend to look like, Iran's pretty much the template for where they seem to want to get to.
Potential Killer Application: sharing family photos with family. Almost everyone has a digital camera these days, but almost nobody (apart from SlashDot readers) has their own home server. A lot of people still try to share photos by email.
It'd be interesting to see how they're handling security, though. Damn, now I'm going to have to download it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if you want to ensure that the optical links between your devices are more secure, you could try networking your room with a collection of long, thin, hollow, flexible cylindrical light-guards. A system of tubes, if you will.
Not sure if there are any advance details yet, though. I think they announced it last year, and with the Nexus launch they've now got their toe-in-the-water online merchant stuff set up, so now I guess they have to graft a set of eBook databases onto the back of it and get the publisher permissions. They can probably pick up a lot of passing trade by making the public-domain chunk of their library downloadable.
Lots of iPod owners are students who simply won't buy DRM'ed music when they can download non-DRMed material from bittorrent. If all iTunes music was DRM, they woudln't get any iTunes sales from those owners. That's why Jobs takes a public stance on his being against DRM.
For just about everything else, Jobs is an almost total control freak regarding what you're allowed to do with your devices and your data. If you're a shop, and you want to install OSX (which you've bought) on non-Apple hardware, you get sued. You buy an iPod Touch, and the thing comes from the shop in a pre-bricked state, it can't even get to its startup screen until it's been activated by plugging it into iTunes. They want you to buy from iTunes so badly that you aren't allowed to use the hardware at all until iTunes is fully installed on your computer.
That's not Hollywood's fault, that's Jobs.
The iPad has to function as a reader, so it allows you to load up a number of different filetypes onto the device, including MSWord, RTF, PDF and so on.
On the iPhone, all those file extensions are blocked. Even if you have a third-party app that can display them, you can't put your own document files onto the device from your computer, unless you circumvent the iTunes synch software by signing up with a fileserver service and going via the internet ... just to get around the Apple restrictions.
//text files// are blocked from being transferred across. That's not Hollywood or CBS records. That's Jobs' work. Got an Apple bluetooth keyboard? Want to use it with your Apple bluetooth iPod? Tough. They don't want to undercut laptop sales. The hardware has an FM radio onboard, but it's unsupported, because if you could listen to the radio on your iPod Touch, the radio station would get the advertising revenue rather than Apple.
Even
Pretty much Apple's entire business model is now focused on narrowly restricting what people can do with their hardware and software. If iTunes has a DRM-free premium shop, then that's great, but don't kid yourself that it's a sign that Apple's cultural values make them in favour of people being allowed to do what they want with the software and hardware they've paid for. Maybe they used to think like that once, but nowadays its just a sales slogan.
When's the last tme you tried to order an expensive book from a bookshop, cash in advance, and the shop owner said, "No, I'm sorry, we won't take your order because we refuse to deal with that publisher, because we think that their books cost the customer too much money" ? There's a range of legitimate reasons why a bookshop might refuse to take orders for a book, but this isn't one of them. A bookshop's core business is supposed to be selling books. If it lets its other commercial interests damage its ability to carry out that core function, then it stops being seen by its customers as an honest vendor, and it loses customer loyalty.
Amazon could get away with behaving like arses when the Kindle was a dominant platform, but when the 2010 tablet netbook models appear, and the iPad ships, and Apple's iTunes book sales kick in, and Google launch their eBook shop ... the amazon/Kindle convergence doesn't look so powerful.
Compare the Kindle to an Ubuntu-powered colour tablet netbook that displays ANY eBook from ANY source, holds your entire MP3 collection, plugs into your digital camera, works as a digital picture frame, has an onboard webcam, functions as a skype terminal, lets you write reports and edit your shopping list, and browse the internet and glossy colour content via wifi, lets you plug in a cheap external DVD writer to watch your movies and backup your data, and isn't locked to a single telecom provider.
Amazon have a huge presence as a store, but Apple already have a lot of "premium" cutomers, and Google have so much customer goodwill that their store could get huge very quickly if they don't screw it up (they screwed the pooch a bit with publishers with their Google Books mismarketing, but everyone else still likes them). If amazon stay aggressively focussed on just the Kindle, and Apple and Google are seen as carrying more formats and more content, then suddenly amazon aren't the premiere "go-to" eBook store any more.
It's going to be an interesting eight months. Will amazon start selling Kindles at cost? How many do they have in the warehouse? I just wish that we had real-time product sales information so that we could track exactly what's happening in the market right now, the week-by-week sales figures for all these mobile devices must be gripping reading.
That's the iPoo
For instance, you know that fun app that lets users exchange business cards by bumping fists? AFAIK, that's not actually a bluetooth app. To get it to work, the "bump" software company has had to set up an internet server that people can subscribe to in advance, the bump application sends a bump signal over the internet to the server when the accelerometer yelps, and the server works out which pair of worldwide devices are bumping at the same time, so that it can take the business card data from the two subscribers and zap it back to the other (over their net connection?).
They had to jump through hoops to make it //look// like a bluetooth or IR transfer, but AFAIK, it's all internet (someone correct me if I've got this wrong).
If //this// device is the same, then (apart from the possibility of now allowing an Apple bluetooth keyboard) we'd seem to be just talking about wifi and the 3G option as data connectivity options.
For instance, the list of files that you could put onto your iPod Touch via the USB cable was kinda minimal. No "office" documents to speak of, no spreadsheets, no wordprocessor files, no html files, no PDF files. Sure, you could install "apps for that", but they'd have to get their source document files from the internet, because Apple's gatekeeper sync application would block those file types from being loaded onto the device's internal storage via USB, even if you had an app that could display them. The bluetooth was crippled so you couldn't get your files on by bluetooth, and there wasn't a card slot to get them on that way. So if you wanted to transfer a draft PDF brochure or itinerary onto your iPT, you normally had to do it by loading it onto an internet server and downloading it into the iPT off the net. Or by the back door using Google Docs or Zoho or some other "cloudish" software.
Apple basically went out of their way to make sure that there was no way for the user to have a free choice of what they loaded onto the iPT, short of jailbreaking it. You couldn't even use the Apple bluetooth keyboard with it, because that'd have undercut their laptop sales, so the sorts of peripheral choices you had with the Palm Pilot in the 1990s (remember those cute pocket-size folding keyboards?) were "verboten" for the iPhone.
With the new iPad, things aren't quite so bad. Apple now graciously gives you permission to load your MSOffice files onto the device, along with PDFs. Not OpenOffice files, though, or any other unrecognised file types. You will apparently be allowed to use an external keyboard with it, which is an advance, but that keyboard will probably have to be made by Apple. And hopefully they'll have sorted some of the limitations of the iPT that stopped it being any good as a PDA unless you were synching over wifi to an internet server. Maybe give it a native "ToDo" manager, the native ability to create contact list categories, stuff like that.
But basically, yes, it's a big iPod Touch with a few less limitations. Still gated for most data types, but now allowed to transfer at least //some// ebook formats under iTunes control (although AFAIK we're still waiting to see if it'll support ==all== common eBook formats, or just the ones that Apple will be selling via their shop). It still only seems to have one button, though (sigh. Apple.)
Personally, I think the iPad is still much too restrictive, and I'm planning on waiting for an ASUS EeePad instead.
I want to be able to store any files I want, I want proper working bluetooth and peripherals, I want to be able to run any class of software I choose. I'd quite like the option of installing Ubuntu if the bundled OS doesn't suit me, and I'd like an SD card to allow me to quickly shunt files between machines, and probably also USB, so I could use it with a cheap external keyboard or peripherals like scanners and TV tuners. Basically I'd like a full-blown slate-format version of a netbook, something that'd let me edit and reorganise files on the device itself, rather than just being a dumb satellite device like the iPT, that relies on a parent device to do all its file organisation for it. ... five buttons like the Palm organisers, or a scroll wheel or up-down buttons - something that'd let me jump straight to a few major applications and functions, and maybe page through files without having to use the touchscreen. Some people would also want an inbuilt webcam, for use with Skype.
IMO, the device doesn't have to be dirt-cheap, but it has to be flexible, and for me, the Apple device just doesn't have the flexibility that I'd want if I was going to b
Ideally, some sort of additional front-panel or edge-mounted navigation hardware would be useful, with a raised "feel" (unlike the Apple's single recessed "home" button)
sperm
Fun-failure.
Also the police helicopters.
I keep remembering that videoconferencing scene in Demolition Man, with the conference table surrounded by motorised portrait-mode screens. I think it'd be funny to have conferences where a missing member attended by Skype, and had a personal assistant assigned to wave their screen-camera around in an interested way to point at whoever was talking.
With a few absentees it'd start to look like Japanese mime or puppet theatre. You could have the operators wearing black ninja costumes to blend into the background. It could get surreal.
File under "OSPD" ("operation successful, patient died").
If your apartment had a pneumatic tube point, you could order a pizza online, and the pizza place could roll it up and stuff it into a canister, and it could arrive minutes later! Wheee!
So Google just announced their unlocked smartphone before Apple can announce what they're going to do with the iPhone (wonder how badly top-line iPhone sales have paused while people wait for the Nexus specs?), MS appear to be about to announce a slate-type device on the ~6th before Apple can announce their (hypothetical) device ... Apple must be feeling like everyone's ganging up on them to rob them of things to announce.
I wonder how many days left 'til ASUS announce the spec and launch date of their new EeePad (undermining the iPod Touch)?
I suppose Apple might launch an iTunes-based movie distribution channel, but there's still a chance that Sony or Sky might have something up their sleeve ...
I wouldn't mind an ASUS EeePad. But I think I'd prefer an ASUS EeePod Touch.
I suppose that the ideal candidate would be someone with army training, who's been taught how to deal with terrorists, and who ideally has psychology training so that he knows what to look out for. So maybe the perfect candidate would be an army psychologist with weapons training, perhaps one who'd be happy to take the airline posting rather than go to Iraq?
In which case, after your recruitment drive, you'd find that amongst your hundreds of new air staff, you'd have employed this guy.
I'd distinguish between at least three major human indicator traits, just to start with: cleverness, brightness and smartness (and that's before you start specifying other traits like artistic ability, ability to make inspired "leaps", aesthetic sense, creativity, empathic ability, and so on).
The rule of thumb is: if you think that "intelligence" is important, but you don't know the difference between "clever" and "bright", then you're probably not that bright (although you may well be clever).
"Clever but not bright" people tend to fixate on rigid systems of measurable quantities, rigid official definitions and correct solutions. They're the intellectual equivalent of racehorses - put them on a track with a defined goal and they'll beat all-comers, but put them out in the wider world to problem-solve, and they're liable to starve to death when something unexpected happens.
The subject of IQ tends to attract people who are quite driven, and perhaps quite clever, but often not all that bright. Bright people would tend to query the basic validity of the IQ metrics, realise the problems, and decide that since the field was so dodgy they'd rather go into some other, more respectable branch of science. So as a result, a disproportionate amount of work on intelligence is junk science, because by default, it's usually done by people who are just that little bit dim, and either don't see the problems or don't care.
Another worry is that any time the BBC appears to be stepping away from its public service remit, there are people who will try to leverage that and use it against them.
See, if I was Rupert Murdoch, I'd want Ofcom to agree to the BBC's request. I'd want the Beeb to standardise a DRM copy-protect system and insist that it appeared on all next-generation Freeview boxes. It'd help make Sky's DRM seem less obtrusive. Me-Murdoch would then want the triumphant BBC-HD people to run with their new DRM system to the Hollywood studios, and buy first-broadcast rights to a few really big high-profile movies, to launch the channel (which is probably the real reason why the BBC-HD guys wanted the feature, to make those sorts of negotiations easier).
And then, me-Murdoch would strike. I'd announce that the BBC was an out of control monster, that it was Sky who was the real innovator that had invested heavily in bringing HD to the public, I'd point out that since the Beeb had implemented DRM, there wasn't much to differentiate between what they were doing and what Sky were doing, except that the BBC channel had the unfair advantage of being funded by licence-fee payers who didn't have a choice. I'd argue that with BBC-HD, the management had finally shown their true colours and abandoned their public-service principles, that their request to Ofcom meant that they accepted that they were working outside their remit, and that their HD channel was therefore a sign of the megalomania of the BBC board to have a successful movie channel showing blockbuster Hollywood imports, rather than being a legitimate use of the licence fee. They were going after Sky's market, and wasting licence fee money, partly paid by Sky subscribers (who didn't have a choice) to fund it. If the BBC was going to operate within the restrictions of its charter then that was one thing, but if it was going to divert money from homegrown talent to Hollywood megamovies, go after Sky's market, and ignore any charter obligations that might hold it back, then BBC-HD was operating unfairly against competition law, and against it own charter, and spending money in ways that to had no right to, in an attempt to disrupt a "proper" commercial channel. The evidence would be difficult to argue with.
Me-Murdoch would demand that BBC HD to be shut down or sold off as a commercial venture to sink or swim in the commercial market without help, and would then lobby MP's and make sure that all my newspapers carried editorials and stories campaigning against the high licence fee and BBC waste, and agreeing with my argument. The BBC had abandoned its principles! The board should be sacked! I'd also make it be known that if this wasn't going to happen, then at the very least I'd want some sort of equitable compensation, perhaps a chunk of the licence fee money could go to Sky to pay for the Sky news channel (which is available on Freeview), or some sort of rebate on the licence fee could be organised for Sky subscribers (or given direct to Sky on their behalf), and/or some new budgetary or legal restrictions set up limiting what the BBC could and couldn't do.
And if all this was scheduled to happen after the election, then if the Conservatives won, there might be a decent chance of Murdoch getting it to work.
If Murdoch then wanted to buy a DRM-enabled terrestrial HD broadcast system dirt cheap, and use it as a feeder system to channel users towards Sky HD, he'd have the opportunity. If he didn't want it, he could stand back and watch it be shut down for lack of buyers, and simply enjoy the fact that he'd destroyed a potential competing channel anf damaged the BBc into the bargain. Win-win!
So if Ofcom had allowed the BBC request, Murdoch would have been given a really strong financial incentive to have his media network throw its weight strongly behind the Conservative party winning the next election.
I guess the BBC technical guys probably don't realise that what they just did by asking Ofcom for that special permission nearly set up a disastrous chain of events that could not only have destroyed the BBC-HD channel and crippled the BBC, it might also have been instrumental in swinging the next UK general election.
But luckily for them, they failed. :)
Lets overlook the fact that you can already home-record standard-definition Freeview broadcasts and save them to recordable DVD, and the fact that that hasn't eliminated DVD sales.
How badly are these twelve products being affected by home copying?
title #1, Small Island There's currently no UK DVD or BluRay DVD of Small Island. You can't buy it in the shops, and you can't pre-order it. There's no release date, and (AFAIK) no indication from the BBC that it'll ever be available on disc, on any format. What I did find from a Google search was that there are lots of people online who like the series, plaintively asking if anybody knows when they might please be able to give someone their money and buy a copy, because the BBC can't give them any information about availability.
So as far as Small Island is concerned, yes there IS a serious problem wrecking its DVD/BluRay sales, but its not piracy, it's the distributor ... there isn't any legal product available that piracy could undercut.
Small Island was much-anticipated, and delayed. Its first episode got five million viewers, beating ITV1's premiere showing of Batman Begins. There are people desperate to buy it. Adding Freeview HD DRM here wouldn't have helped. All it would have done would be to further antagonise the viewers who the BBC were refusing to sell legit copies to. I'm sure that if they finally bring the thing out on disc, after a year they'll look at the sales and someone will ask why the DVD sales figures were so disappointing for something that was so well received, and someone from BBC Worldwide will shake their head sadly and say, well, you know, piracy ... it was on BBC HD without DRM ... we kinda expected it ...
... But the truth is their sales will be lower than they should have been because during the entire period when the series was getting great reviews and being heavily promoted, they had no product to sell, nothing to take advance orders for, and no information for retailers or customers for when (or if) any such product might be available.
If you don't win the lottery, and you didn't buy a ticket, it's not the fault of pirates.
Title #2, Sharpe's Peril (2008) This is now available in the UK, but the UK release is region-flagged "region 2", so it's not supposed to be sold in the US except as a special import. If you're in the US, you're not really supposed to buy the UK discs, you're supposed to only buy the "proper", legit, region 1 disks (grey importing being regarded by the industry as only slightly less bad then piracy). Trouble is, they've apparently not yet gotten around to actually making any of those region 1 disks of Sharpe's Peril yet, even though the thing was broadcast over a year ago, back in 2008. The good news is, you can now order a "region 1" copy of Sharpe's Peril online. The bad news is, you'll still have to wait until the second quarter of 2010 for delivery.
Gee, I wonder why their worldwide disc sales aren't as good as they might have been? Could the fact that they've not yet been able to deliver a single legal region 1 disk to any customer perhaps be contributing to the lack of a "buzz" amongst US customers?
Title #3, Day of the Triffids Your third example, "Day of the Triffids" (2009) also isn't available on disc. In this case it's understandable, because the thing doesn't start being broadcast until Monday December 28th, but even after it starts being broadcast, you won't be able to buy it on disc straight away. If you're worried about missing an episode, you'll h
You're right about the "corporation" bit. Under English law, a "corporation" is "an artificial human being" ("corp..." referring to things bodylike), so the BBC as a corporation is singular whenever we're talking about a matter of centralised policy (whenever the BBC is acting as a single entity).
However, there are many groups within the BBC in charge of different aspects of policymaking (such as the technical and standards groups), so "The BBC" can also be considered as a group, and when one of these groups does a thing, or floats an idea that can't be treated as a definitive official action by the corporation, we tend to use the plural (plurals sometimes being used to symbolise "fuzziness", to signify vagueness over who exactly it is that's being referred to).
"The BBC" can also be plural when it refers to a group of broadcast channels.
So for instance you might hear people saying:
PS: On the "corporation" bit, that's what niggled me about Asimov's "I Robot" series ... the ongoing plot element about the robot wanting to have status as a person. I don't see why they couldn't simply have had him registered as a corporation. Corporations have reponsibilities and can be deemed to have committed crimes (eg corporate manslaughter), they can own property, and they can be subjected to penalties, like people. If you want to deem a sentient robot to be an autonomous entity, then declaring them an "artificial person" seems appropriate.
That's right, the business with Americans' prolific use of z's seems to be a holdover from an alternative spelling convention that dates back to before English was properly standardised (Note: "standardised", not "standarized").
Californian "Valley Talk" in particular seem to have strong elements of late Seventeenth/early Eighteenth century spoken English, notably the "delayed negative" that's often used for humour or emphasis (this is well known ... not).
This anachronistic anomaly may be due to the comparatively high proportion of vampires that left Europe for the New World to avoid persecution at around the time of the Founding Fathers, and who kept migrating West until they ended up concentrated in small communities in California.
IMO, significant numbers of people first started thinking that global warming was a con at about the same time that some scientists decided that a change in public policy was an overriding necessity, and started exaggerating the case for gw in publlic. They knew that scientifically the case was "strong," but when it came to talking to the public, they set aside the scientific method and started saying that it was a "fact".
And at that point, even people who weren't climatologists, and who were sympathetic to the idea of global warming started to get antsy and suspecting that they were being bullshitted at. Sure, the bullshit was in a good cause, but bullshit is bullshit, and if you catch someone trying to persuade you to do something by bullshitting you, you tend to dig in your heels and refuse. Because people don't like being conned.
Luckily, just when it seemed that the climatologists were going to lose the battle, the US government came to their aid by being caught trying to edit and repress data. At that point, it stopped being seen as a scientific conspiracy to exaggerate data, and started being seen as a governmental conspiracy to repress data. The scientists turned back into the good guys (or at least, the least worst guys).
What climategate does it to flip the tide back again, by turning the latest news story into one about //scientists'// attempts to suppress data.
This isn't the public's fault. They have people on both sides of the argument trying to con them, and they have no primary way of checking the data themselves. In that situation, the rule of thumb is that whoever seems to be trying to con you the worst is the person you shouldn't listen to.
The scientists should have known that in the current febrile atmosphere, the easiest way to lose the argument was to get caught doing something dishonest. It was absolutely imperative that nobody did anything underhand. And still ... they went ahead and did it anyway, and got caught.
So the reasonable public response is to think: if these people were fiddling data even in //this// situation, when they //must// have known it was a dumb idea, then how much else has been fiddled?
Remember, we're living in an age where the assurances of authority figures are increasingly seen as worthless and corrupt and self-serving. When Microsoft tell us that Vista is a great operating system, and the US governemnt tells us that the economy is fine, just before a crash. Where the US military intelligence plans an invasion of Iraq that's staggeringly inept, and tells us that it's going to be a pushover. In which the biggest Wall Street financier turns out to be a con artist, and financial experts turn out to have less understanding of the economy than the local real-estate agent.
It's an age in which we know that //some// experts are lying to us to try to get us to do what they want. The one defence we have (as the general public) against being lied to is that when we catch someone cheating us, we make sure that they don't get what they want. We take the opposite position to the one that the cheater wants us to take. It's a strategy that hopefully makes experts realise that cheating is counterproductive, so tha they hopefully revert to telling us the truth.
And THIS was the environment in which our climatology guys decided that it'd be a good wheeze to take a few liberties with the data. That was really stupid.
The Iranians then figured that the Shah was a puppet of the West and yet another example of their country being screwed over to suit Western interests, and in the resulting puritan, anti-West, anti-corrpution backlash, they put in Ayatollah Khomeni. :(
So it's not so much that the Iranians don't like freedom, it's more that we confronted them with a stark choice over what sort of freedom they wanted: If they wanted a powerful government who were "clean", and couldn't be bribed or blackmailed or corrupted by foreign powers, the Mullahs were holding themselves forward as the only immediate candidates for the job. So the Iranians gave them a go.
To some Iranians, the US and UK are still the most powerful evil influence that they need to be protected against, and giving up some freedoms to the mullahs is considered the lesser of two evils. The religious government then have an incentive to constantly emphasise how bad the West are, because however bad //they// are, at least they're protecting the Iranians from us. We're the barbarians at the gates, the spectre of the mushroom cloud.
The mullahs argue that if Iranians want to protect their country from foreign evildoers who want to bomb them and destroy their way of life, and who have no concept of human rights or morality, then they have to make certain sacrifices and be prepared to give up certain long-held personal freedoms in order to be strong enough as a country to be victorious over the threat from abroad.
Basically, the Mullahs use the same arguments as George Bush. ... that sort of thing. Probably plays at least as well in Iran as it does in the US.
Patriotism, destiny, God, freedom, way of life, the threat from outside, the need to keep up a united front against the evil ideology of those who hate us and will never sleep until the country is overthrown (but they will never manage it because they are weak and cowardly and we are stronger, becuase we know that our cause is just)
The funny thing is, when you look at how some of the Republican Party want to converge Church and State, and what the end result would tend to look like, Iran's pretty much the template for where they seem to want to get to.
It'd be interesting to see how they're handling security, though. Damn, now I'm going to have to download it.