The fuss is not about ID cards per-se, the fuss is about the UK government trying to create yet another tool to spy-upon, track and control UK residents.
CCTV all over the place, 28 days detention without trial (which the government tried to extend to 45), police abuses against peaceful demonstrators, extra-strong anti-libel laws used to silence whistle-blowers, anti-terrorist laws which are mostly used for things which have nothing to do with terrorism, attempts at setting up an infrastructure for widespread Internet surveillance, covert Internet censorship, the health-and-safety blank card used to pretty much ban anything the authorities feel like banning, collusion with torture, unjustified wars (Iraq), soldiers sent to (die in) war with improper equipment because the government is too cheap, parliamentarians abusing the expenses system and politicians and civil servants that have taken to visibly and frequently lie and spin as if people are all stupid.
It's no wonder that trust in the politicians and public institutions (including the police) in the UK is at an all time low...
I've worked in IT for 12 years in 3 countries (Portugal, Holland, UK) and have reached a level of seniority where I not only deal with the technical side of things but also liaison with the business (read it as: non-technical stakeholders) in a non-technical corporation, which requires some understanding of people and social situations beyond what's usually required from programmers and an ability to not be dazzled by elegant verbal constructs (in other words, I'm a consultant).
That said, I very rarely have crossed paths with really good managers.
The vast majority fail by not taking structured and methodical approaches to planning. Too much "seat-of-the-pants" management, too little analysis and planning.
A lot of them fail by not planning with error margins, or by not taking in account external dependencies in the planning (e.g. we need data X from provider Y before we can start step Z).
I've rarely came across a manager that actually looks at software development as a process and tries to have the appropriate kind of process methodology in place for the appropriate kind of project (e.g. some methodologies are better for "close to the user" projects where stakeholders need feedback early and will do adjustments to the requirements often while others are better for highly technical projects where your stakeholders are other technical teams).
Above all, project management ends up putting too much emphasis on Heroes to save the project when things go wrong and too little on Surveyors which "map the terrain" at the start of the project (I can be both, which is what keeps me in this business).
My pet theory is that, because software development is still closer to the "way of the artisan" (each project is something different from all other projects, tailored to specific unique needs) than to the "way of the manufacturer" (standardized things made in standardized ways), efficiency and effectiveness comparisons between projects are hard to do so too many mediocre managers succeed in surviving within IT simply because their performance cannot really be compared like-to-like with that of other managers.
Do you know that 2% of the regular population has antisocial disorder? Do you know that 70% of prison inmates have it?.... a little factoid I like to share when I talk about dogs that bark, birds that fly, and genetically differentiable humans that do things differently.
Ah, but the big question is: - Do those 70% of prison inmates that have antisocial disorder already had it when they were put in prison.
In some countries, being a shifty bastard that can turn from sharing a ciggy with you to shanking you if you cross him is actually a survival trait in prison.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that in the less fair justice systems, it's just as much the prison that turns most of the inmates into violent individuals as the actual "selection process" that makes sure only mostly violent individuals end up in prison.
The main thrust for Linux on netbooks will be the new generation of ARM based devices which have battery life times which are much longer than those for laptops, comparable to mobile phones, all this with smaller (lighter, cheaper) batteries.
For ARM processors, MS' only offer at the moment is Windows CE, which is a POS.
In that arena, the most likely winners (at least in the short term) are Android or some other Linux variant.
Fact remains that doing honest and hard work brings you NOTHING. You must be a quack, a liar and just basically leech everything out of the company that you possibly can. Then you go to the next and rinse and repeat. It's what the managers do and it's what is expected of you. Being a carpenter is starting to sound bloody perfect just about now.
I've learned that on my first year in this profession (also IT).
The belief that many of us gifted "techies" have that technical excellence, skill and hard-working will make us stand out from the mediocre crowds, be noticed and promoted is one big fat illusion more often than not kept alive by manipulative managers wanting to get extra free hours from us (so that THEY get fat bonuses).
Even in the technical areas, the professional world out there is never a pure meritocracy based on one's technical excellence.
In truth, non-technical skills are often also important (guess who's more useful: the guy that gets the requirements right from the client and implements them in a competent way or the guy that gets the wrong requirements and implements the wrong thing but with an exceptionally good design and code?) and those that evaluate one's abilities during the selection/bonus-evaluation/promotion-evaluation process are often not technically skilled enough to evaluate technical skills above a certain level (they're management, usually not technical, not-good enough techies or simply too far out from their technical days) or will simply outwit the less negotiation-experience techies into taking a lower pay.
Consider the simple example of two equally good programmers: - One is quiet and reserved: the kind of guy that finds a critical bug, fixes it and checks it in source control without telling anybody - The other one is loud and outgoing: he'll tell to whomever is willing to listen that he found a critical bug, proceed to fix it and check the fix in source control and then let everybody know that the issue is fixed.
Guess who will get the next promotion!!!?
Another example would be two equally good programmers, both known in their company for the quality of their work. They both feel that they are being underpaid in their company: - One starts looking at other opportunities, maybe gets one or two good proposals, goes to management and asks for a salary raise saying that he "likes to work there but feels that he's not being fairly rewarded for the work he's doing there versus other professionals in the same area". - The other one just accepts its and wallows in the misery of being underpaid.
Guess who will get the (biggest) raise!!!?
In the end, the secret to success in IT is still down to soft-skills such as self-promotion, image management, networking, pro-activeness, a willingness to take risks and others. Just look up the definition of EQ (Emotional Quotient, similar to IQ but measuring something else) - it's much correlated with success than IQ, and you will find that the characteristics that are evaluated to determine EQ are very much the kind of thing that make it easier for one to follow the path to success.
I live in the UK, more specifically in the outskirts of London. In my area the paid parking places are the ones closest to the train station (which is not even in the local high street) while places further out are uncontrolled. There are no significant commercial or industrial areas close to the paid parking zones. My only conclusion is that the paid parking is designed to catch those people (from far off areas where public transportation coverage is not as good) driving to the station to catch the train.
How is this supposed to promote using of public transportation (if one's going to have to pay for parking, one might as well drive all the way to central London) is beyond me.
Many cities around the world deploy parking meters in places where there is no lack of parking places as a form of revenue for the local authorities.
Also parking meters are usually deployed in such a way as to eliminate all other parking alternatives (if the purpose was to make parking spaces available for those who really need it, then only some of the places would need to be made "premium" with parking meters while most spaces would remain free)
To further enhance the income from parking, most parking meter systems are also designed in such a way (pay first) that users either have to overpay (pay more time than you use) or are hit with significant fines for going overtime.
This is why most people hate parking meters and other paid parking system in public spaces.
I for one welcome our new parking meter infecting virus overlords.
given that there was little man made CO2 pre- 1940's
And here I was, thinking that the Industrial Revolution had started in the 19th century, powered pretty much solely by coal (about as dirty a fuel as you can get).
Software for consumers is mostly Consumer Products which is a part of the industry that doesn't employ that many IT professionals.
The vast majority (by far) of IT professionals works in IT Services and in-house software development units, both of which are pretty much all about custom enterprise applications development and integration.
The other bit of the industry left (IT Corporate Products) is again all about corporate applications development and integration (which while mostly product oriented still includes a lot of product customization work)
Come to think of it, in my whole career in IT (12 years, 3 countries in Europe) I have never even met anyone which exclusively worked in consumer products.
This is not at all illogical: - Companies have all sorts of strange and complex needs in many different domains, are must less prone to adjust their internal processes to the software and have the monetary means to pay to have IT professional (either in house or contracted) to create and/or adjust software to match those companies' internal processes.
Consumers on the other hand have a much narrower range of needs and are much more likely to just accept and follow the way their software makes them do things (which is why, for example, cross-integration between consumer products from different companies is almost nonexistent except if one is dominant in a market).
Adding cloud computing to a statement about the status of the industry for the past 15 years and calling if a forecast is neither a forecast nor news.
So basically Switzerland with their reasonably small cantons and a Democratic system has the best possible government structure of those currently known.
[which the USA, due to non-proportional vote, gerrymandering and HUGE states (bigger than many Western European countries) doesn't even begin to get close]
Currently, a group makes a pilot, then tries to sell it to networks, which fund the series. It wouldn't be a massive change to release the pilot publicly and ask people for contributions towards making the full series. Once you've raised enough capital, you start production. You then encourage peer-to-peer distribution of the first season's episodes, because anyone who enjoys watching the show is someone you may be able to get money from to make the next season, or to make your next project. Unlike draconian copyright amendments, this model has the advantage that it funds the really valuable act, that of creating the work, not that of copying it.
In a way of sorts this already happens with some MMOs like Lord Of the Rings Online or EVE Online - the game developers put out the initial game world, with most of the programing and the engine in place plus a decent chunk of content. People pay a monthly fee which is mostly goes into adding content and tweaking/improving/adding-features to the game engine ("free" content updates). By receiving a monthly fee from the players, the developers keep on adding content and improving the game in order to keep those players in (and paying) and attract more players.
At the moment, the main differences from what you describe in TV Series and MMOs is that: - In MMOs the initial chunk of content is quite large and requires a significant up-front investment to get started. - It has mostly been successfully deployed in content rich games (basically those with big "worlds" which take time for the player to explore) which have some kind of sticky component to the subscription (i.e. the player invests a significant amount of time in-game to "get stuff" or "level up" and finds it hard to part with those things) - thus those games are mostly (if not all) MMORPGs.
That said, in the old days (I'm feeling old now) companies like ID Software became successful by releasing part of the game free and having those that were interested pay for the rest of the game - although in their case the "rest of the game" was already mostly developed when they released the free part and before people payed them for anything - which is how Quake came to be.
"Creators" can, just like everybody else, choose to get life insurance and pay for it from the income they get from their work while they are alive. Everybody else does it, so why should "creators" be treated in any way special?
That some "creators" choose not to have life insurance is because copyright has been extended to such extreme levels. Would copyright be brought back to fairer (for society as a whole) lengths said "creators" would choose to take life insurance or not just like everybody else.
Should the children of a brick-layer be entitled to receive a stipend for every house their father helped build (payed whenever a house gets resold or rented) for 20 years after his death just in case he dies unexpectedly early? If not, then why should that be different for the children of a writer, actor, singer or other "creators" of copyrighted works?
They saw no reason to change that after they defeated what was then the most powerful military state in the world
Actually it was pretty much the Europeans and the Russians that defeated "what was then the most powerful military state in the world" - there were a lot fewer Americans fighting in WWII than people from any other nationality, so much so that on D-day, there were more non-Americans landing in the beaches in Normandy than Americans. But hey, don't let History get in the way of blind nationalism and Hollywood imagery.
Unless of course, you mean Japan, in which case: my bad.
That said, excluding that bit of propaganda, the rest of your post sounds logical.
There is no way that you can be absolutely sure that every atom always decays at the same rate. You need faith for a good chunk of science in 2009.
And yet, if somebody showed that the speed of decay changed over time and that observation could be repeated, then the whole building of knowledge done on top of it would shift and change to adjust to the discovery that a basic law of physics is actually not what we thought.
That's the core difference between Science and Religion - in Religion, faith is supposed to absolute and unshakable, no proof required, no falsifying possible. In Science there is no faith - at best you have a "I'll go with this until it's proven wrong" posture - a mental artifact of which, in some people's minds, could be confused with "faith". (If you're approaching any Scientific theory, no matter how basic in a faith-like way, you're doing it wrong)
As with everything, in Science to do any work you have to assume (until proven otherwise) that some basic laws are as we think they are. If you start challenging everything all the time then you end up in the domain of Philosophy (the father of Science) where you ultimately challenge that reality is as we perceive, down to challenging one's own existence. [Reality as we perceive is something we believe are aware of through our senses. However, it's perfectly possible that "true" reality is something like the Matrix (we all live in an illusion) or even further, that nothing is as we perceive it and we ourselves are but a dream of an unfathomable alien conscience. Consider that there hasn't been much "work done" in solving that specific question since "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am", Descartes, 17th century)]
Analysis about trends and behaviors of young consumers is done predominantly by people which are not teenagers anymore and haven't been such for at least 10 years. Those people have a "grown-up" view on teenagers, based on their past experience as teenagers, having grown at a time when neither Computer Games, the Internet or Mobile phones were widespread and available to your typical teenager, much less your average kid.
Nowadays, children get introduced to many or all of those things sometimes before they can walk. It's thus hardly surprising that a report on what teenagers like, which was done by a teenager, has a whole different take on things than your typical report done by a 30-year-old analyst.
What's news here is that somebody actually listened to the teenager's opinions and found them worthy of publication.
Of course, given that financial analysis is pretty much opinionated bullshit (I should know, I work in Investment Banking), you should take it with a pinch of salt, even when coming from a 15-year-old.
In the last one or two decades there has been a movement to "liberalize" everything in Europe.
The whole argument was that the Market is always better at allocating resources than the State. At the same time governments got one-off payments for each piece of state property they sold - which they use to beautify their budgets - and move some costs off-budget (the costs are still there, even bigger, but accounting tricks make them look smaller) through public-private partnerships and such.
This was mostly done during the Decade of Deceit where lots of imaginary money was being made and opinion makers in Democratic nations were singing praises to the Anglo-Saxon model (where most of that imaginary money was being made) and wanted to emulate it.
Hopefully the events of the last year have put a stop to the blind belief in Market Efficiency working for everything (the Market really only works well for some markets and is prone to herd-mentality) and has made it really clear how much the Anglo-Saxon model was based in illusory profits (for the next 20+ years we'll all be paying for the excesses of the last decade through higher taxes and lower public service).
The question now is whether parties/voters will move towards a balanced approach to capitalism or whether we'll have another credit/banking bubble burst in 10-20 years time (judging by the kind of weak/show-only laws being passed by governments to constrain banking excesses, I bet on the last)
I strongly suggest you take a good hard look at the current crop of politicians you have elected (and re-elected) in Holland. The right-wing moralistic (for Holland) types that are leading the Government coalition on a second term now are half the reason why I personally left Holland.
The other half are the huge taxes and scant public service - in the last couple of years everything has been privatized but taxes stayed at Sweden-like levels.
In the last decade Holland has been adopting the Anglo-Saxon model (privatizing everything - politicians call it "liberalizing") so going in the direction of a surveillance-society is hardly surprising.
PS: I'm not dutch but I live in Holland for almost 9 years. I started by admiring the dutch and their society and from my point of view the place has been slowly sliding towards a "control-society" like what you see in the UK.
The study measured the time that ideas/memes/stories took to come out. Given that nowadays a large number of "stories" are released by politicians/companies and most do so in a tightly controlled way, usually by means of "statements to the press" or "interviews".
Guess who gets the press passes or the interviews? The press, not the bloggers.
That said, blogs are almost entirely opinion pieces: they don't break the news, instead they give us the blogger's personal interpretations of the news (or opinion over the state of something or something-else in the world).
The best blogs are those which analyze multiple news and events and bring them together with other knowledge to show us the patterns and flows behind the public facade: in a sense, investigative journalism on the cheap (they don't usually validate the sources).
Actually I sometimes used my mobile phone with a standalone GPS receiver (the actual receiver bit, not what the OP incorrectly names as "GPS receiver" when what he means is a "GPS navigation device": GPS receiver + display + computing power + routing software) via bluetooth with no problems.
Both the receiver and the phone have their own independent batteries and can go on for hours, maybe days between recharges (certainly it's days for the mobile phone).
The external GPS receiver has no reception problems (it does take up to 1 minute to lock in from cold) and the mobile phone (Nokia E51) is nice and thin for day to day use since it has no built-in GPS receiver.
That said, for any more-than-on-day hiking trip you're better of with a Garmin that can take AA or AAA batteries.
How many venues of approach to solve a problem does the patent cover? A patent which is too broad or a patent which covers an obvious (to the practitioners) key element in most approaches to solve the problem will seriously hinder innovation (in the extreme, most of the approaches not blocked by the patent will be uneconomical to develop and/or deploy, thus stopping all innovation in that area).
What are the licensing prices and conditions attached to the patent? Many patents are deployed as business barriers to entry (instead of being used to make money) and will either not be available for licensing, have extremely high licensing costs and/or have unacceptable licensing conditions (say, "3 months only, renewable or not at the choice of the patent owner") - in this case patents are used to reduce competition in a specific business domain, which by extension reduces innovation (fewer companies competing in a business area = less money spent in R&D in related technologies).
Some current practices include webs of patents designed to close as many viable approaches to solve a problem as possible with the aim of keeping the competition away from you business area.
On top of that, the huge number of patents in certain domains means that more and more money is spent checking for patents and throwing away work because an (independently discovered) line of research ended up in a patent barrier. Said money would otherwise have gone into actually doing research, so innovation is hindered.
Slashdot Mirror
Simply put:
The fuss is not about ID cards per-se, the fuss is about the UK government trying to create yet another tool to spy-upon, track and control UK residents.
CCTV all over the place, 28 days detention without trial (which the government tried to extend to 45), police abuses against peaceful demonstrators, extra-strong anti-libel laws used to silence whistle-blowers, anti-terrorist laws which are mostly used for things which have nothing to do with terrorism, attempts at setting up an infrastructure for widespread Internet surveillance, covert Internet censorship, the health-and-safety blank card used to pretty much ban anything the authorities feel like banning, collusion with torture, unjustified wars (Iraq), soldiers sent to (die in) war with improper equipment because the government is too cheap, parliamentarians abusing the expenses system and politicians and civil servants that have taken to visibly and frequently lie and spin as if people are all stupid.
It's no wonder that trust in the politicians and public institutions (including the police) in the UK is at an all time low ...
I've worked in IT for 12 years in 3 countries (Portugal, Holland, UK) and have reached a level of seniority where I not only deal with the technical side of things but also liaison with the business (read it as: non-technical stakeholders) in a non-technical corporation, which requires some understanding of people and social situations beyond what's usually required from programmers and an ability to not be dazzled by elegant verbal constructs (in other words, I'm a consultant).
That said, I very rarely have crossed paths with really good managers.
The vast majority fail by not taking structured and methodical approaches to planning. Too much "seat-of-the-pants" management, too little analysis and planning.
A lot of them fail by not planning with error margins, or by not taking in account external dependencies in the planning (e.g. we need data X from provider Y before we can start step Z).
I've rarely came across a manager that actually looks at software development as a process and tries to have the appropriate kind of process methodology in place for the appropriate kind of project (e.g. some methodologies are better for "close to the user" projects where stakeholders need feedback early and will do adjustments to the requirements often while others are better for highly technical projects where your stakeholders are other technical teams).
Above all, project management ends up putting too much emphasis on Heroes to save the project when things go wrong and too little on Surveyors which "map the terrain" at the start of the project (I can be both, which is what keeps me in this business).
My pet theory is that, because software development is still closer to the "way of the artisan" (each project is something different from all other projects, tailored to specific unique needs) than to the "way of the manufacturer" (standardized things made in standardized ways), efficiency and effectiveness comparisons between projects are hard to do so too many mediocre managers succeed in surviving within IT simply because their performance cannot really be compared like-to-like with that of other managers.
Ah, but the big question is:
- Do those 70% of prison inmates that have antisocial disorder already had it when they were put in prison.
In some countries, being a shifty bastard that can turn from sharing a ciggy with you to shanking you if you cross him is actually a survival trait in prison.
I wouldn't be at all surprised that in the less fair justice systems, it's just as much the prison that turns most of the inmates into violent individuals as the actual "selection process" that makes sure only mostly violent individuals end up in prison.
The main thrust for Linux on netbooks will be the new generation of ARM based devices which have battery life times which are much longer than those for laptops, comparable to mobile phones, all this with smaller (lighter, cheaper) batteries.
For ARM processors, MS' only offer at the moment is Windows CE, which is a POS.
In that arena, the most likely winners (at least in the short term) are Android or some other Linux variant.
I've learned that on my first year in this profession (also IT).
The belief that many of us gifted "techies" have that technical excellence, skill and hard-working will make us stand out from the mediocre crowds, be noticed and promoted is one big fat illusion more often than not kept alive by manipulative managers wanting to get extra free hours from us (so that THEY get fat bonuses).
Even in the technical areas, the professional world out there is never a pure meritocracy based on one's technical excellence.
In truth, non-technical skills are often also important (guess who's more useful: the guy that gets the requirements right from the client and implements them in a competent way or the guy that gets the wrong requirements and implements the wrong thing but with an exceptionally good design and code?) and those that evaluate one's abilities during the selection/bonus-evaluation/promotion-evaluation process are often not technically skilled enough to evaluate technical skills above a certain level (they're management, usually not technical, not-good enough techies or simply too far out from their technical days) or will simply outwit the less negotiation-experience techies into taking a lower pay.
Consider the simple example of two equally good programmers:
- One is quiet and reserved: the kind of guy that finds a critical bug, fixes it and checks it in source control without telling anybody
- The other one is loud and outgoing: he'll tell to whomever is willing to listen that he found a critical bug, proceed to fix it and check the fix in source control and then let everybody know that the issue is fixed.
Guess who will get the next promotion!!!?
Another example would be two equally good programmers, both known in their company for the quality of their work. They both feel that they are being underpaid in their company:
- One starts looking at other opportunities, maybe gets one or two good proposals, goes to management and asks for a salary raise saying that he "likes to work there but feels that he's not being fairly rewarded for the work he's doing there versus other professionals in the same area".
- The other one just accepts its and wallows in the misery of being underpaid.
Guess who will get the (biggest) raise!!!?
In the end, the secret to success in IT is still down to soft-skills such as self-promotion, image management, networking, pro-activeness, a willingness to take risks and others. Just look up the definition of EQ (Emotional Quotient, similar to IQ but measuring something else) - it's much correlated with success than IQ, and you will find that the characteristics that are evaluated to determine EQ are very much the kind of thing that make it easier for one to follow the path to success.
I live in the UK, more specifically in the outskirts of London. In my area the paid parking places are the ones closest to the train station (which is not even in the local high street) while places further out are uncontrolled. There are no significant commercial or industrial areas close to the paid parking zones. My only conclusion is that the paid parking is designed to catch those people (from far off areas where public transportation coverage is not as good) driving to the station to catch the train.
How is this supposed to promote using of public transportation (if one's going to have to pay for parking, one might as well drive all the way to central London) is beyond me.
Many cities around the world deploy parking meters in places where there is no lack of parking places as a form of revenue for the local authorities.
Also parking meters are usually deployed in such a way as to eliminate all other parking alternatives (if the purpose was to make parking spaces available for those who really need it, then only some of the places would need to be made "premium" with parking meters while most spaces would remain free)
To further enhance the income from parking, most parking meter systems are also designed in such a way (pay first) that users either have to overpay (pay more time than you use) or are hit with significant fines for going overtime.
This is why most people hate parking meters and other paid parking system in public spaces.
I for one welcome our new parking meter infecting virus overlords.
And here I was, thinking that the Industrial Revolution had started in the 19th century, powered pretty much solely by coal (about as dirty a fuel as you can get).
Thanks for clearing that up.
Can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, that's what I always say.
Software for consumers is mostly Consumer Products which is a part of the industry that doesn't employ that many IT professionals.
The vast majority (by far) of IT professionals works in IT Services and in-house software development units, both of which are pretty much all about custom enterprise applications development and integration.
The other bit of the industry left (IT Corporate Products) is again all about corporate applications development and integration (which while mostly product oriented still includes a lot of product customization work)
Come to think of it, in my whole career in IT (12 years, 3 countries in Europe) I have never even met anyone which exclusively worked in consumer products.
This is not at all illogical:
- Companies have all sorts of strange and complex needs in many different domains, are must less prone to adjust their internal processes to the software and have the monetary means to pay to have IT professional (either in house or contracted) to create and/or adjust software to match those companies' internal processes.
Consumers on the other hand have a much narrower range of needs and are much more likely to just accept and follow the way their software makes them do things (which is why, for example, cross-integration between consumer products from different companies is almost nonexistent except if one is dominant in a market).
Adding cloud computing to a statement about the status of the industry for the past 15 years and calling if a forecast is neither a forecast nor news.
Rules and Laws without Enforcement are not worth the paper they're written on.
So basically Switzerland with their reasonably small cantons and a Democratic system has the best possible government structure of those currently known.
[which the USA, due to non-proportional vote, gerrymandering and HUGE states (bigger than many Western European countries) doesn't even begin to get close]
A broken clock is right at least twice a day.
In the summer, when you got to the beach in most of Europe you'll see naked breasts all day long.
Believe me, once it's commonplace it's not special anymore.
In a way of sorts this already happens with some MMOs like Lord Of the Rings Online or EVE Online - the game developers put out the initial game world, with most of the programing and the engine in place plus a decent chunk of content. People pay a monthly fee which is mostly goes into adding content and tweaking/improving/adding-features to the game engine ("free" content updates). By receiving a monthly fee from the players, the developers keep on adding content and improving the game in order to keep those players in (and paying) and attract more players.
At the moment, the main differences from what you describe in TV Series and MMOs is that:
- In MMOs the initial chunk of content is quite large and requires a significant up-front investment to get started.
- It has mostly been successfully deployed in content rich games (basically those with big "worlds" which take time for the player to explore) which have some kind of sticky component to the subscription (i.e. the player invests a significant amount of time in-game to "get stuff" or "level up" and finds it hard to part with those things) - thus those games are mostly (if not all) MMORPGs.
That said, in the old days (I'm feeling old now) companies like ID Software became successful by releasing part of the game free and having those that were interested pay for the rest of the game - although in their case the "rest of the game" was already mostly developed when they released the free part and before people payed them for anything - which is how Quake came to be.
"Creators" can, just like everybody else, choose to get life insurance and pay for it from the income they get from their work while they are alive. Everybody else does it, so why should "creators" be treated in any way special?
That some "creators" choose not to have life insurance is because copyright has been extended to such extreme levels. Would copyright be brought back to fairer (for society as a whole) lengths said "creators" would choose to take life insurance or not just like everybody else.
Should the children of a brick-layer be entitled to receive a stipend for every house their father helped build (payed whenever a house gets resold or rented) for 20 years after his death just in case he dies unexpectedly early? If not, then why should that be different for the children of a writer, actor, singer or other "creators" of copyrighted works?
Actually it was pretty much the Europeans and the Russians that defeated "what was then the most powerful military state in the world" - there were a lot fewer Americans fighting in WWII than people from any other nationality, so much so that on D-day, there were more non-Americans landing in the beaches in Normandy than Americans. But hey, don't let History get in the way of blind nationalism and Hollywood imagery.
Unless of course, you mean Japan, in which case: my bad.
That said, excluding that bit of propaganda, the rest of your post sounds logical.
Steam games are pirated.
Steam works based in the same principle as this one, so i hardly see how this is going to thwart piracy any more than Steam.
And yet, if somebody showed that the speed of decay changed over time and that observation could be repeated, then the whole building of knowledge done on top of it would shift and change to adjust to the discovery that a basic law of physics is actually not what we thought.
That's the core difference between Science and Religion - in Religion, faith is supposed to absolute and unshakable, no proof required, no falsifying possible. In Science there is no faith - at best you have a "I'll go with this until it's proven wrong" posture - a mental artifact of which, in some people's minds, could be confused with "faith". (If you're approaching any Scientific theory, no matter how basic in a faith-like way, you're doing it wrong)
As with everything, in Science to do any work you have to assume (until proven otherwise) that some basic laws are as we think they are. If you start challenging everything all the time then you end up in the domain of Philosophy (the father of Science) where you ultimately challenge that reality is as we perceive, down to challenging one's own existence.
[Reality as we perceive is something we believe are aware of through our senses. However, it's perfectly possible that "true" reality is something like the Matrix (we all live in an illusion) or even further, that nothing is as we perceive it and we ourselves are but a dream of an unfathomable alien conscience. Consider that there hasn't been much "work done" in solving that specific question since "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am", Descartes, 17th century)]
Analysis about trends and behaviors of young consumers is done predominantly by people which are not teenagers anymore and haven't been such for at least 10 years. Those people have a "grown-up" view on teenagers, based on their past experience as teenagers, having grown at a time when neither Computer Games, the Internet or Mobile phones were widespread and available to your typical teenager, much less your average kid.
Nowadays, children get introduced to many or all of those things sometimes before they can walk. It's thus hardly surprising that a report on what teenagers like, which was done by a teenager, has a whole different take on things than your typical report done by a 30-year-old analyst.
What's news here is that somebody actually listened to the teenager's opinions and found them worthy of publication.
Of course, given that financial analysis is pretty much opinionated bullshit (I should know, I work in Investment Banking), you should take it with a pinch of salt, even when coming from a 15-year-old.
In the last one or two decades there has been a movement to "liberalize" everything in Europe.
The whole argument was that the Market is always better at allocating resources than the State. At the same time governments got one-off payments for each piece of state property they sold - which they use to beautify their budgets - and move some costs off-budget (the costs are still there, even bigger, but accounting tricks make them look smaller) through public-private partnerships and such.
This was mostly done during the Decade of Deceit where lots of imaginary money was being made and opinion makers in Democratic nations were singing praises to the Anglo-Saxon model (where most of that imaginary money was being made) and wanted to emulate it.
Hopefully the events of the last year have put a stop to the blind belief in Market Efficiency working for everything (the Market really only works well for some markets and is prone to herd-mentality) and has made it really clear how much the Anglo-Saxon model was based in illusory profits (for the next 20+ years we'll all be paying for the excesses of the last decade through higher taxes and lower public service).
The question now is whether parties/voters will move towards a balanced approach to capitalism or whether we'll have another credit/banking bubble burst in 10-20 years time (judging by the kind of weak/show-only laws being passed by governments to constrain banking excesses, I bet on the last)
I strongly suggest you take a good hard look at the current crop of politicians you have elected (and re-elected) in Holland. The right-wing moralistic (for Holland) types that are leading the Government coalition on a second term now are half the reason why I personally left Holland.
The other half are the huge taxes and scant public service - in the last couple of years everything has been privatized but taxes stayed at Sweden-like levels.
In the last decade Holland has been adopting the Anglo-Saxon model (privatizing everything - politicians call it "liberalizing") so going in the direction of a surveillance-society is hardly surprising.
PS: I'm not dutch but I live in Holland for almost 9 years. I started by admiring the dutch and their society and from my point of view the place has been slowly sliding towards a "control-society" like what you see in the UK.
Hardly surprising.
The study measured the time that ideas/memes/stories took to come out. Given that nowadays a large number of "stories" are released by politicians/companies and most do so in a tightly controlled way, usually by means of "statements to the press" or "interviews".
Guess who gets the press passes or the interviews? The press, not the bloggers.
That said, blogs are almost entirely opinion pieces: they don't break the news, instead they give us the blogger's personal interpretations of the news (or opinion over the state of something or something-else in the world).
The best blogs are those which analyze multiple news and events and bring them together with other knowledge to show us the patterns and flows behind the public facade: in a sense, investigative journalism on the cheap (they don't usually validate the sources).
Actually I sometimes used my mobile phone with a standalone GPS receiver (the actual receiver bit, not what the OP incorrectly names as "GPS receiver" when what he means is a "GPS navigation device": GPS receiver + display + computing power + routing software) via bluetooth with no problems.
Both the receiver and the phone have their own independent batteries and can go on for hours, maybe days between recharges (certainly it's days for the mobile phone).
The external GPS receiver has no reception problems (it does take up to 1 minute to lock in from cold) and the mobile phone (Nokia E51) is nice and thin for day to day use since it has no built-in GPS receiver.
That said, for any more-than-on-day hiking trip you're better of with a Garmin that can take AA or AAA batteries.
In the end it depends very much on two things:
Some current practices include webs of patents designed to close as many viable approaches to solve a problem as possible with the aim of keeping the competition away from you business area.
On top of that, the huge number of patents in certain domains means that more and more money is spent checking for patents and throwing away work because an (independently discovered) line of research ended up in a patent barrier. Said money would otherwise have gone into actually doing research, so innovation is hindered.