Is this really "to define the digital age"?
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
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· Score: 5, Interesting
While I support the Eldred/Lessig position, this Business Week article doesn't really tell us anything new or interesting about this case that hasn't been seen here before.
In fact, it's overblown. This case is hardly "a case to define the digital age" as the article has it. This is an argument about whether Congress can extend legacy copyright from 50 to 70 years after the death of the holder. So if the government wins, what changes? Nothing. The European Union changed its copyright term to 70 years throughout the EU back in the mid-1990s, and I don't see that it's made much difference. If corporations are going to lose "billions in lost revenue" then they will 20 years down the road instead.
The copyright laws apply to all media and performance styles. Digital is but a small part of all the possible media consequences, of course, although it will get more important.
The worrying implication, I suppose one could make, is that if the CTEA is waved through, then the way is open for Congress to keep punting out the copyright envelope out further and further (perhaps to protect Mickey Mouse) - 100 years, 120 years, why not 150 years? Sadly, that's not the direct issue in this case.
The article is also confused about copyright of works themselves and other issues, such as format, editing, translation and so on. The Adobe issue the article mentions isn't about Middlemarch's copyright (which has unambiguously expired) but about proprietary formats - anyone in the world can buy a old copy of Middlemarch, sit down and type it out and post it on their website or print it off. As for Aristotle's Politics - someone has to translate that into English (for example), and edit it, and maybe do footnotes and an introduction. That's different than the underlying copyright of the work itself. But Business Week doesn't clock that.
But what I really fail to see is that somehow, if Eldred et al win, this has implications for the DMCA. These issues are so different that there isn't an obvious connection from one to the other (except that both the CTEA and DMCA suck generally). Copyright issues involving software and so on are much more akin to pharmaceuticals and medicine than books and poems - but that's really another story. I can see there's a global connection - Congress having a constitutional imperative to pass copyright laws that promote "science and useful arts". But that's going to require a case by case, or an act by act, resolution, whether Eldred wins or not. Traditionally, the Supreme Court sends those type of issues back to Congress to decide, and that's probably what will happen here, so don't hold your breath.
Jack Schofield, the Jack in "Ask Jack," the title of this Q&A, is a notoriously pro-MS cheerleader. It's almost sickening, in fact, having read his articles over the years. Many newspapers have these sort of "Doctor PC" columns, and they give Microsoft a free ride in terms of customer support and advertising. But how is it these columns don't ever advise: "Internet Explorer really sucks, you should download Mozilla" or whatever superior Open Source alternative there is. Certainly Jack never does.
In fact, last week the section's letters page got a letter from a reader asking why "Ask Jack" never answered any Mac queries, or any other OS for that matter. The reply was, oh Jack's a real expert, you can ask him anything. So, please, go ahead, why not "Ask Jack" your deepest questions about some tricky Debian or Slackware problem, I'm sure he'll be just delighted to answer. Email him at: jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
Which reminds me: whoever developed the T9 "text recognition" input for the T68i, well I don't think English was their first language somehow. It's a pain in the ass and I switched it off as soon as I could.
I've had the Sony Ericsson T68i (pictured in there somewhere) for a couple of weeks, and it's a great little number. Apart from being very small and light, and having infrared and Bluetooth, it's got a tiny clip-on digital camera, which takes relatively good quality pix - you can then email them from the phone or send them as a MMS message in about 5 seconds. Older phones that can't take the JPG get a message directing them to a website, with logon and password, to view the photo. It's fun for a while, and surprisingly useful (while furniture shopping last week I could mail my wife a photo of the proposed purchase for approval).
Speaking of which, took delivery of a new convergence device, the XDA, about to come on the market in the UK (and Germany to follow), from British phone company O2. Looks great ( see it here) and works very smoothly, a GPRS phone combined with a Pocket PC... that's the downside, Microsoft. Otherwise it does all the things you'd want something like this to do: always on email, web surfing, MP3 player, phone, the whole caboodle.
Organisers say that at least 1,200 paying guests came through the door, each stumping up £3 ($5). It shows there's a demand out there for this type of event, something to bear in mind for any/. conferences.
Hats off to Dave at NTK and the other organisers, for all their hard work.
Woo hoo - never seen so many geeks in one place. There's a stall selling teatowels (trans: dish clothes) with various browers and Google search results printed on them - ideal for geek washing-up, maybe that one day a week when you rinse out the old coffee mug.
It's one of those things. Italian politicians have been talking about building this damn thing for a very long time. 30 years? More like 50. In fact, I have a vague memory reading that Mussolini even proposed building it at one point.
Because the economies of the south of Italy, and especially Sciliy, are so (relatively) poor, this bridge plan is always being mooted as the solution. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s all sorts of dumb public works projects would take place in the south as Keynsian boosts to the local economy, and the bridge was one of the projects that was always "soon" to take place.
Will it happen? Who knows, but the article mentioned "within three years" - frankly, I'd be surprised. Why the BBC thought this was worth reporting, I don't know.
Unlike similar combat games, the primary goal of "America's Army" is not killing a massive number of enemies, but instead completing tasks and setting career goals. "Will there be guys tearing off arms and using them for clubs? No. Because the Army would never do that."
They just lost their target audience - if I can't use somebody's arm as a club, I ain't interested. Career goals? Fsck that.
Yes, it is very impressive array of talent - I only mentioned Friedman because he's the one most non-economists have heard of. For what it's worth, having Coase on board is important, because his work bears directly on issues like this: the Nobel prize citation explains it here.
I agree with all that, but the problem is the definitions of the categories being used by the "judges" at Wired may not - although the three categories are so vapid as to mean just about anything.
Matrix and Terminator both rely on a war-between-man-and-machines scenario set-up that I can't find plausible - but I don't think that matters in a good sci-fi film, even if Wired might. People forget the fiction aspect of science-fiction. Fsck the plausibility I say, give me a good plot, good characters in a well-executed movie, and I'm happy. Setting up bogus parameters to judge by is pointless. Yes, I can suspend disbelief. Put it another way: Armagedon sucked for all sorts of reasons, not because of the "Apple virus into the alien mainframe" blodge. Hell, if they'd used a better laptop, would that have made it a better film? No. That no-one can explain how the Death Star destroys a whole planet without causing a black hole or some god-damn thing, or even manages to generate enough enegy in the first place, doesn't make Star Wars IV a bad film either. Anyone find "the Force" scientifically plausible? See what I mean.
Yes, I take your point about that. All I'd say is that there are plenty of distopian visions (in movies and elsewhere) of corporations gone rotten, and I'm not entirely convinced it's a particularly sic-fi viewpoint.
Of course these lists are only done as a piece of trollery, which is fine, but what annoys me is when they claim some psudo-scientific system behind it all - such as this ratings "system". Adrenaline, fine, that's excitement, but the other two? "Vision" - how well it presents a scenario for the future, and "Precision", whether the science behind the fiction holds up. Well, most of the movies on this list fail those two.
I mean, take The Matrix: great film (IMHO). But vision - yeah, I can just see a near-future where man and machines fight a war, the machines win and enslave us all as power generators while building a convincing virtual world. Oh yeah, and the science holds up on that as well. Pfffft.
Yeah, Alien as a precise and visionary view of the future: we are going to be chased around space ships by huge monsters. That works on so many levels (Homer Simpson). Terminator - yes, I can see the day (soon perhaps) when metal killing machines are sent back through time. In fact it's probably happening now, and the cyborgs are all working at Wired writing crappy ersatz movie ratings. Based on these ratings, Soylent Green shouldn't be on this list at all because none of the things it predicted for right now have come true: it's Malthusian "vision" made in the 70s turned out to be way off beam for the 21st century - unless you count playing Asteroids.
On the other hand, under vision and precision, Robocop should probably come tops.
Don't get me wrong, I like all the movies on the list, but all this "precision" and "vision" crap is mere justification for someone's sci-fi movie tastes.
Since submitting the story, yesterday I went to the press launch of the exhibition, and it's extraordinarily good. Basically, imagine dying and going to videogame heaven, because that's what this is like.
The exhibit doesn't have much in the way of "how games are made" filler - this is about games, games, games: 150 playable games! Woo hoo! If you're looking for an excuse to go on holiday to London, let this be it.
Going in the door there's an actual DEC PDP-1 unit on which the original Spacewar! was played. Then it's a gentle stroll through the development of games and the consoles, with almost all of them working models, some of which are hardly seen outside of Japan (the Nintendo Famicon, for example). There are some games looked at in-depth: sections on GTA3, and the making of the Sims, as well as Pokemon - there are copies of ancient GameFreak magazines - and some incredible Final Fantasy lithographs by Yokshitaka Amano. The "sound" of videogames also gets some recognition, and obviously the influence of Japan (including a couple of working Pachinko machines). The multiplayer section's cool, with a five-player playable Bomberman set-up.
Criticisms? Well, not many, unless you want to know how games are actually developed, but who cares? The "new release" section is a bit weak, with just PS2's Harry Potter game and XBox's motogp, neither of which are cutting edge. And there's no Doom, which is a serious omission given the game's historical importance in the growth of the industry (although there is Wolfenstein 3D). It would have been good (from a personal point of view) to have had the whole Metal Gear series on show, rather than just MGS2, but hey.
Strong-points: the exhibition is "platform neutral" - it's not sponsored by Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft (the organisers told me they resisted a bit of pressure from the console makers to get involved - at the cost of pushing out their rivals), and the consoles themselves are dealt with even-handedly.
The exhibition's in London until mid-September, then goes to the National Museum in Scotland. It's signed up to go to Helsinki next autumn/fall - and negotiations are going on with venues in the US and Japan. All the games are free, it's £11 entry (about $16), and at the moment it's all-day entry, but they are talking about a two-hour time limit - so get in there before the school holidays kick off. There's also a £20 exhibit guide book, but it's not worth the money (or indeed the paper it's printed on).
I've always wondered about Terminator 2 - ok, accepting all the time-travel-is-possible stuff: at the point right at the end where the original Terminator arm was dropped in the molten steel (or whatever), shouldn't Arnie have disappeared right then? Since he wouldn't have been possible to "invent"?
P.S. Oh, and in 24, how is it that a terrorist mastermind can get access to all of the "national security" internal cameras, even with inside help, and no-one noticed? Nothing strange in the logs there? Hmm?
There's a very good reason why Microsoft has withdrawn its witnesses: the states aren't allowed to introduce "new" evidence, and so were hoping to raise some 14 rather embarassing documents from Microsoft with MS employees. So MS withdrew the witnesses, and now the states can't raise the documents (it seems). Great tactic, it has made the states' lawyers look foolish.
There has been a couple of news items about this, there's one from the FT here - it says:
Lawyers for the nine litigating US states in the Microsoft antitrust remedy hearings yesterday appeared to have been comprehensively out-manoeuvered by their counterparts defending the software giant, after the Microsoft legal team decided to halve the number of defence witnesses it would call.
In particular, Microsoft's decision not to call Richard Fade, its executive in charge of relations with computer manufacturers, means the states' lawyers will probably not be able to enter critical evidence before the court.
This is the latest blow to the states' case. Earlier in the hearings, their lawyers misunderstood rules about how new witnesses should be called, leaving them without key testimony.
More interesting is the news today that Sony and Real have announced a tie-up. They'd already announced an alliance to use Real software in the PS2 - this is a further development, with Sony buying a stake in Real with the aim of using its software in other consumer devices.
Real has put out a press release here, which says: "Sony plans to adopt these combined digital distribution solutions in a variety of networked CE products such as Sony's networked audio products and Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation2 computer entertainment system."
The Wall Street Journal notes that the deal brings together two Microsoft rivals - the WSJ story requires $$$+registration, but the basics are:
The companies didn't announce specific product agreements, but said their research and development groups will regularly collaborate on developing new technologies. Sony said it would adopt RealNetworks' media technologies broadly in a variety of consumer electronics devices with network connections to personal computers and the Internet, and RealNetworks will consider using a Sony antipiracy format in its software.
While the financial side of the deal is small and RealNetworks is in no immediate need of cash, the investment gives Sony at least a symbolic stake in the future of RealNetworks. RealNetworks competes fiercely with Microsoft in the market for Internet audio and video software, and it has joined other companies in accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices that threaten their businesses. Sony and Microsoft, meanwhile, became archcompetitors in the videogame market with Microsoft's introduction late last year of the Xbox, a heavily promoted rival to Sony's market-leading PlayStation 2.
Dave Fester, a Microsoft general manager, said the alliance with Sony wouldn't affect the appeal of Microsoft's own media software to electronics companies, but adding that it could "drive a wedge between Real and other consumer electronics manufacturers."
Yet even [Elvis] Costello acknowledges that, at least in terms of the big record companies, ''They've loaded the game so the house has been winning for a long time. Now it's time maybe for the house not to win for a while. Maybe they have to take some losses.''
Actually it looks like they are taking some losses now - there's a very interesting (but long and a bit heavy on the piracy angle) article from the Observer newspaper in the UK, that used a net monitoring company to track how many downloads of music and movies are being done through KaZaA and similar. The article has a table of the top 10 downloads: number one was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with more than 5 million in a month - that's how many copies the album sold retail last year in total. You may not like the music industry, or agree with their tactics, but they gotta be hurting. Get ready for copy-protected music CDs, coming soon to every store near you.
From the article:
Top 10 downloaded movies 1 Black Hawk Down 169,000 2 The Fast and the Furious 168,000 3 The Lord of the Rings 165,000 4 Ocean's Eleven 154,000 5 Harry Potter 147,000 6 Monsters Inc 146,000 7 Collateral Damage 134,000 8 American Pie 2 126,000 9 A Beautiful Mind 125,000 10 Ali 100,000
Top 10 pirated albums downloaded last month 1 Linkin Park -Hybrid Theory 5,300,000 2 POD - Satellite 2,800,000 3 Creed - Weathered 2,600,000 4 Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler 2,500,000 5 Britney Spears - Britney 2,000,000 6 Nelly - Country Grammar 2,000,000 7 Nelly, et al - Training Day Soundtrack 1,800,000 8 Creed - Human Clay 1,600,000 9 Usher - 8701 1,500,000 10 Incubus - Make Yourself 1,500,000
Hmm, interesting. Seeing into the submit bin is also helpful, in more ways than one. I often wonder, when submitting a story, if anyone else has already submitted it. If we could see the submit bin (and rejects and acceptances) then the chances are the editors would have to deal with a lot fewer duplications... users wouldn't waste their time submitting stories that were already pending or rejected, and the editors wouldn't get so much noise in the bin.
The book's just been published here in the UK, and the weekend's papers have got reviews - including one that makes the same point (sort of) about Deep Blue. There's a good review here by Simon Singh, the guy that wrote Fermat's Last Theorem; he mentions that Edmund Cartwright set about building the first power weaving loom after seeing the Turk, reasoning that if a machine could play chess it must be possible to build one that could weave, and so contributing to the start of the industrial revolution.
BTW, the author of the Mechanical Turk is the technology correspondent of The Economist magazine, I see from his website.
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While I support the Eldred/Lessig position, this Business Week article doesn't really tell us anything new or interesting about this case that hasn't been seen here before.
In fact, it's overblown. This case is hardly "a case to define the digital age" as the article has it. This is an argument about whether Congress can extend legacy copyright from 50 to 70 years after the death of the holder. So if the government wins, what changes? Nothing. The European Union changed its copyright term to 70 years throughout the EU back in the mid-1990s, and I don't see that it's made much difference. If corporations are going to lose "billions in lost revenue" then they will 20 years down the road instead.
The copyright laws apply to all media and performance styles. Digital is but a small part of all the possible media consequences, of course, although it will get more important.
The worrying implication, I suppose one could make, is that if the CTEA is waved through, then the way is open for Congress to keep punting out the copyright envelope out further and further (perhaps to protect Mickey Mouse) - 100 years, 120 years, why not 150 years? Sadly, that's not the direct issue in this case.
The article is also confused about copyright of works themselves and other issues, such as format, editing, translation and so on. The Adobe issue the article mentions isn't about Middlemarch's copyright (which has unambiguously expired) but about proprietary formats - anyone in the world can buy a old copy of Middlemarch, sit down and type it out and post it on their website or print it off. As for Aristotle's Politics - someone has to translate that into English (for example), and edit it, and maybe do footnotes and an introduction. That's different than the underlying copyright of the work itself. But Business Week doesn't clock that.
But what I really fail to see is that somehow, if Eldred et al win, this has implications for the DMCA. These issues are so different that there isn't an obvious connection from one to the other (except that both the CTEA and DMCA suck generally). Copyright issues involving software and so on are much more akin to pharmaceuticals and medicine than books and poems - but that's really another story. I can see there's a global connection - Congress having a constitutional imperative to pass copyright laws that promote "science and useful arts". But that's going to require a case by case, or an act by act, resolution, whether Eldred wins or not. Traditionally, the Supreme Court sends those type of issues back to Congress to decide, and that's probably what will happen here, so don't hold your breath.
Jack Schofield, the Jack in "Ask Jack," the title of this Q&A, is a notoriously pro-MS cheerleader. It's almost sickening, in fact, having read his articles over the years. Many newspapers have these sort of "Doctor PC" columns, and they give Microsoft a free ride in terms of customer support and advertising. But how is it these columns don't ever advise: "Internet Explorer really sucks, you should download Mozilla" or whatever superior Open Source alternative there is. Certainly Jack never does.
In fact, last week the section's letters page got a letter from a reader asking why "Ask Jack" never answered any Mac queries, or any other OS for that matter. The reply was, oh Jack's a real expert, you can ask him anything. So, please, go ahead, why not "Ask Jack" your deepest questions about some tricky Debian or Slackware problem, I'm sure he'll be just delighted to answer. Email him at: jack.schofield@guardian.co.uk
Which reminds me: whoever developed the T9 "text recognition" input for the T68i, well I don't think English was their first language somehow. It's a pain in the ass and I switched it off as soon as I could.
I've had the Sony Ericsson T68i (pictured in there somewhere) for a couple of weeks, and it's a great little number. Apart from being very small and light, and having infrared and Bluetooth, it's got a tiny clip-on digital camera, which takes relatively good quality pix - you can then email them from the phone or send them as a MMS message in about 5 seconds. Older phones that can't take the JPG get a message directing them to a website, with logon and password, to view the photo. It's fun for a while, and surprisingly useful (while furniture shopping last week I could mail my wife a photo of the proposed purchase for approval).
Speaking of which, took delivery of a new convergence device, the XDA, about to come on the market in the UK (and Germany to follow), from British phone company O2. Looks great ( see it here) and works very smoothly, a GPRS phone combined with a Pocket PC... that's the downside, Microsoft. Otherwise it does all the things you'd want something like this to do: always on email, web surfing, MP3 player, phone, the whole caboodle.
Organisers say that at least 1,200 paying guests came through the door, each stumping up £3 ($5). It shows there's a demand out there for this type of event, something to bear in mind for any /. conferences.
Hats off to Dave at NTK and the other organisers, for all their hard work.
Woo hoo - never seen so many geeks in one place. There's a stall selling teatowels (trans: dish clothes) with various browers and Google search results printed on them - ideal for geek washing-up, maybe that one day a week when you rinse out the old coffee mug.
It's one of those things. Italian politicians have been talking about building this damn thing for a very long time. 30 years? More like 50. In fact, I have a vague memory reading that Mussolini even proposed building it at one point.
Because the economies of the south of Italy, and especially Sciliy, are so (relatively) poor, this bridge plan is always being mooted as the solution. In fact, in the 1970s and 1980s all sorts of dumb public works projects would take place in the south as Keynsian boosts to the local economy, and the bridge was one of the projects that was always "soon" to take place.
Will it happen? Who knows, but the article mentioned "within three years" - frankly, I'd be surprised. Why the BBC thought this was worth reporting, I don't know.
Nice way to belittle the work and sacrifices that I and millions of other people throughout the world ...
Speaking as one of those millions, I thought it was funny.
Unlike similar combat games, the primary goal of "America's Army" is not killing a massive number of enemies, but instead completing tasks and setting career goals.
"Will there be guys tearing off arms and using them for clubs? No. Because the Army would never do that."
They just lost their target audience - if I can't use somebody's arm as a club, I ain't interested. Career goals? Fsck that.
Yes, it is very impressive array of talent - I only mentioned Friedman because he's the one most non-economists have heard of. For what it's worth, having Coase on board is important, because his work bears directly on issues like this: the Nobel prize citation explains it here.
I agree with all that, but the problem is the definitions of the categories being used by the "judges" at Wired may not - although the three categories are so vapid as to mean just about anything.
Matrix and Terminator both rely on a war-between-man-and-machines scenario set-up that I can't find plausible - but I don't think that matters in a good sci-fi film, even if Wired might. People forget the fiction aspect of science-fiction. Fsck the plausibility I say, give me a good plot, good characters in a well-executed movie, and I'm happy. Setting up bogus parameters to judge by is pointless. Yes, I can suspend disbelief. Put it another way: Armagedon sucked for all sorts of reasons, not because of the "Apple virus into the alien mainframe" blodge. Hell, if they'd used a better laptop, would that have made it a better film? No. That no-one can explain how the Death Star destroys a whole planet without causing a black hole or some god-damn thing, or even manages to generate enough enegy in the first place, doesn't make Star Wars IV a bad film either. Anyone find "the Force" scientifically plausible? See what I mean.
Well if we were living in The Matrix, they wouldn't let us make a movie about it, would they?
I dunno, I've done plenty of Google searches for Morpheus, but I still can't find him....
Yes, I take your point about that. All I'd say is that there are plenty of distopian visions (in movies and elsewhere) of corporations gone rotten, and I'm not entirely convinced it's a particularly sic-fi viewpoint.
Of course these lists are only done as a piece of trollery, which is fine, but what annoys me is when they claim some psudo-scientific system behind it all - such as this ratings "system". Adrenaline, fine, that's excitement, but the other two? "Vision" - how well it presents a scenario for the future, and "Precision", whether the science behind the fiction holds up. Well, most of the movies on this list fail those two.
I mean, take The Matrix: great film (IMHO). But vision - yeah, I can just see a near-future where man and machines fight a war, the machines win and enslave us all as power generators while building a convincing virtual world. Oh yeah, and the science holds up on that as well. Pfffft.
Yeah, Alien as a precise and visionary view of the future: we are going to be chased around space ships by huge monsters. That works on so many levels (Homer Simpson). Terminator - yes, I can see the day (soon perhaps) when metal killing machines are sent back through time. In fact it's probably happening now, and the cyborgs are all working at Wired writing crappy ersatz movie ratings. Based on these ratings, Soylent Green shouldn't be on this list at all because none of the things it predicted for right now have come true: it's Malthusian "vision" made in the 70s turned out to be way off beam for the 21st century - unless you count playing Asteroids.
On the other hand, under vision and precision, Robocop should probably come tops.
Don't get me wrong, I like all the movies on the list, but all this "precision" and "vision" crap is mere justification for someone's sci-fi movie tastes.
Since submitting the story, yesterday I went to the press launch of the exhibition, and it's extraordinarily good. Basically, imagine dying and going to videogame heaven, because that's what this is like.
The exhibit doesn't have much in the way of "how games are made" filler - this is about games, games, games: 150 playable games! Woo hoo! If you're looking for an excuse to go on holiday to London, let this be it.
Going in the door there's an actual DEC PDP-1 unit on which the original Spacewar! was played. Then it's a gentle stroll through the development of games and the consoles, with almost all of them working models, some of which are hardly seen outside of Japan (the Nintendo Famicon, for example). There are some games looked at in-depth: sections on GTA3, and the making of the Sims, as well as Pokemon - there are copies of ancient GameFreak magazines - and some incredible Final Fantasy lithographs by Yokshitaka Amano. The "sound" of videogames also gets some recognition, and obviously the influence of Japan (including a couple of working Pachinko machines). The multiplayer section's cool, with a five-player playable Bomberman set-up.
Criticisms? Well, not many, unless you want to know how games are actually developed, but who cares? The "new release" section is a bit weak, with just PS2's Harry Potter game and XBox's motogp, neither of which are cutting edge. And there's no Doom, which is a serious omission given the game's historical importance in the growth of the industry (although there is Wolfenstein 3D). It would have been good (from a personal point of view) to have had the whole Metal Gear series on show, rather than just MGS2, but hey.
Strong-points: the exhibition is "platform neutral" - it's not sponsored by Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft (the organisers told me they resisted a bit of pressure from the console makers to get involved - at the cost of pushing out their rivals), and the consoles themselves are dealt with even-handedly.
The exhibition's in London until mid-September, then goes to the National Museum in Scotland. It's signed up to go to Helsinki next autumn/fall - and negotiations are going on with venues in the US and Japan. All the games are free, it's £11 entry (about $16), and at the moment it's all-day entry, but they are talking about a two-hour time limit - so get in there before the school holidays kick off. There's also a £20 exhibit guide book, but it's not worth the money (or indeed the paper it's printed on).
The Guardian newspaper had a review here.
I thought it was pretty good, and I'm afraid to say that I was only mildly surprised to think that Hollywood might make a movie like that....
Anyway, it wasn't a purposefully misleading paragraph, it was making a very valid, and effective, point. Hats off to all involved.
No, soma in Brave New World is a pleasure-giving drug, some sort of narcotic. Sort of like legal crack, without any side-effects.
Hot damn, you're right. Thanks, always wondered about that.
Aside: there's some good time-shift mind-fscks in a great German film, Run Lola Run, that I highly recommend.
I've always wondered about Terminator 2 - ok, accepting all the time-travel-is-possible stuff: at the point right at the end where the original Terminator arm was dropped in the molten steel (or whatever), shouldn't Arnie have disappeared right then? Since he wouldn't have been possible to "invent"?
P.S. Oh, and in 24, how is it that a terrorist mastermind can get access to all of the "national security" internal cameras, even with inside help, and no-one noticed? Nothing strange in the logs there? Hmm?
There's a very good reason why Microsoft has withdrawn its witnesses: the states aren't allowed to introduce "new" evidence, and so were hoping to raise some 14 rather embarassing documents from Microsoft with MS employees. So MS withdrew the witnesses, and now the states can't raise the documents (it seems). Great tactic, it has made the states' lawyers look foolish.
There has been a couple of news items about this, there's one from the FT here - it says:
Lawyers for the nine litigating US states in the Microsoft antitrust remedy hearings yesterday appeared to have been comprehensively out-manoeuvered by their counterparts defending the software giant, after the Microsoft legal team decided to halve the number of defence witnesses it would call.
In particular, Microsoft's decision not to call Richard Fade, its executive in charge of relations with computer manufacturers, means the states' lawyers will probably not be able to enter critical evidence before the court.
This is the latest blow to the states' case. Earlier in the hearings, their lawyers misunderstood rules about how new witnesses should be called, leaving them without key testimony.
Great news, huh?
More interesting is the news today that Sony and Real have announced a tie-up. They'd already announced an alliance to use Real software in the PS2 - this is a further development, with Sony buying a stake in Real with the aim of using its software in other consumer devices.
Real has put out a press release here, which says: "Sony plans to adopt these combined digital distribution solutions in a variety of networked CE products such as Sony's networked audio products and Sony Computer Entertainment's PlayStation2 computer entertainment system."
The Wall Street Journal notes that the deal brings together two Microsoft rivals - the WSJ story requires $$$+registration, but the basics are:
The companies didn't announce specific product agreements, but said their research and development groups will regularly collaborate on developing new technologies. Sony said it would adopt RealNetworks' media technologies broadly in a variety of consumer electronics devices with network connections to personal computers and the Internet, and RealNetworks will consider using a Sony antipiracy format in its software.
While the financial side of the deal is small and RealNetworks is in no immediate need of cash, the investment gives Sony at least a symbolic stake in the future of RealNetworks. RealNetworks competes fiercely with Microsoft in the market for Internet audio and video software, and it has joined other companies in accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices that threaten their businesses. Sony and Microsoft, meanwhile, became archcompetitors in the videogame market with Microsoft's introduction late last year of the Xbox, a heavily promoted rival to Sony's market-leading PlayStation 2.
Dave Fester, a Microsoft general manager, said the alliance with Sony wouldn't affect the appeal of Microsoft's own media software to electronics companies, but adding that it could "drive a wedge between Real and other consumer electronics manufacturers."
Yet even [Elvis] Costello acknowledges that, at least in terms of the big record companies, ''They've loaded the game so the house has been winning for a long time. Now it's time maybe for the house not to win for a while. Maybe they have to take some losses.''
Actually it looks like they are taking some losses now - there's a very interesting (but long and a bit heavy on the piracy angle) article from the Observer newspaper in the UK, that used a net monitoring company to track how many downloads of music and movies are being done through KaZaA and similar. The article has a table of the top 10 downloads: number one was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with more than 5 million in a month - that's how many copies the album sold retail last year in total. You may not like the music industry, or agree with their tactics, but they gotta be hurting. Get ready for copy-protected music CDs, coming soon to every store near you.
From the article:
Top 10 downloaded movies
1 Black Hawk Down 169,000
2 The Fast and the Furious 168,000
3 The Lord of the Rings 165,000
4 Ocean's Eleven 154,000
5 Harry Potter 147,000
6 Monsters Inc 146,000
7 Collateral Damage 134,000
8 American Pie 2 126,000
9 A Beautiful Mind 125,000
10 Ali 100,000
Top 10 pirated albums downloaded last month
1 Linkin Park -Hybrid Theory 5,300,000
2 POD - Satellite 2,800,000
3 Creed - Weathered 2,600,000
4 Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler 2,500,000
5 Britney Spears - Britney 2,000,000
6 Nelly - Country Grammar 2,000,000
7 Nelly, et al - Training Day Soundtrack 1,800,000
8 Creed - Human Clay 1,600,000
9 Usher - 8701 1,500,000
10 Incubus - Make Yourself 1,500,000
Hmm, interesting. Seeing into the submit bin is also helpful, in more ways than one. I often wonder, when submitting a story, if anyone else has already submitted it. If we could see the submit bin (and rejects and acceptances) then the chances are the editors would have to deal with a lot fewer duplications ... users wouldn't waste their time submitting stories that were already pending or rejected, and the editors wouldn't get so much noise in the bin.
The book's just been published here in the UK, and the weekend's papers have got reviews - including one that makes the same point (sort of) about Deep Blue. There's a good review here by Simon Singh, the guy that wrote Fermat's Last Theorem; he mentions that Edmund Cartwright set about building the first power weaving loom after seeing the Turk, reasoning that if a machine could play chess it must be possible to build one that could weave, and so contributing to the start of the industrial revolution.
BTW, the author of the Mechanical Turk is the technology correspondent of The Economist magazine, I see from his website.
Looks like it was about 5.1 on the scale:
check it out here