When Google invoices you for clicks, a share of this money is going to sites that are showing the ads. There are sites that fraudulently drive clicks in order to get more money.
When my firm used adwords, we saw our monthly fees from Google climbing steadily, from $10-20 per month to over $1000, but with no matching increase in traffic, and almost zero contacts via our web site (which was clearly aimed only at Belgian customers). We estimated that 95% of the clicks were fraudulent. We had no way of checking who was clicking on our site. So we cancelled the program and focussed on more traditional sales.
This is, IMO, one of the major skeletons lurking in Google's cupboard.
That is what this study is about... setting the stage for new anti-SAD drugs. This is big pharma marketing.
What's the point here? Perhaps that a huge majority of people who take anti-depressants are actually being abused. I hardly think this is a radical statement: it's just valium all over again.
For many people, their drug is their problem.
My list of cures basically comes down to "get a life" and although I've every faith that drugs can solve some problems, they should be the last solution, not the first.
The European Commission and Parliament have done a deal which looks set to introduce a law that makes this kind of tracking a daily part of police work.
The "Data Retention Directive" proposes tracking all mobile phone and Internet usage, and storing this for 2 years, and (worst) making it available to police and other parties (possibly commercial ones), without much regard to existing privacy laws.
The FFII and EDRI are fighting this in the Parliament, but the directive has been shoved through very brutally by the Council, led by the UK. Basically the bureaucrats of the Commission, unhindered by any European Constitution, are creating laws by stealth, and this Big Brother directive is symptomatic of a take over of the national legislative processes by an group of unelected, unaccountable officials.
The UK Presidency had proposed a very brutal law, which went as far as requiring the logging of the MAC address of every computer connected to the Internet (yes, that blew me away too), and using the Good Cop/ Bad Cop approach, bullied the Parliament into accepting a "compromise" agreement that dropped all the references to terrorism, and added a bunch of waffle about human rights, but basically creates a pan-European database of every cellphone call, and every Internet communication. I've not yet had time to see whether TCP/IP end-points are also logged, but the original proposals definitely requested this.
Europe is rapidly turning into a police state that makes the US look like a haven of freedom and civil rights. The rejection of the European Constitution by the French and Dutch voters, though a nicely symbolic act, have left a power vacuum into which the grey bureaucrats of the Commission have stepped.
Let's see... cage up some hamsters, deprive them of natural light, natural surroundings, and buddies, give them an artificial sucrose-laden diet, see how they get depressed, give them drugs to make them happy?
And then suggest that these results could apply to people? Brave New World, anyone?
Drugs. will. not. fix. you.
Get out of your cage, get into the open, make better relationships, find a job that respects you, stop moving home every couple of years, start talking to your family not shouting at them, eat decent food instead of that sugar-laden "lo-fat" junk you're stuffing your face with, stop watching TV, cut down on the booze, and the religion, and for baby jesus' sake, stop taking artificial drugs.
Cue the debate about US job losses and globalisation. The real issue IMO is the Microsoft tactics of using trade pressure to lobby for anti-competition legislation. "Yes, I'll invest 1.8bn, but only if you ban free software and enable software patents".
The truth is that India is capable of doing a lot better without this kind of "help". I encourage Indian politicians to reject any such pressure. Indian IT can compete securely on the open market, without favours or protectionism. Software patents, and other anti-competitive laws will only hurt India in the medium and long term.
This would be great in tropical countries. Mosquito-borne malaria is one of those diseases that affects a huge number of people (a majority in many countries), which is non-fatal but debilitating. It makes you sick every few months, and you spend a week or so in a terrible fever. Sometimes it's fatal but mostly it just makes people very weak, unable to concentrate on useful work, and so on.
Of course there are hundreds of other diseases that weigh down people living in tropical countries but malaria is one of the big ones. Keeping mosquitos away from places where people live would be a great thing. I just hope the technology will become cheap enough to work in rural Africa.
"No good choices" is pretty pessimistic. "Type Manager" is not just a well-known category of software, as many people have explained, it's most likely a trademark. Very poor choice.
I'm not convinced by your argument that this class of interface is worth having but for the sake of argument, let me suggest some better names...
- Content agent, content browser, content viewer, content app, etc.
- File manager skin, plugin, addon, etc.
- Minibrowser, microbrowser, etc.
- Smart explorer, l'il genius, dinkum toys, widgets, etc.
It'd help a lot if you:
(a) define the actual abstraction you're thinking of. What is it... a mini application, a plugin to a web browser or file manager, what exactly?
(b) define a bunch of real and plausible examples.
(c) think of who will actually want to use these.
(d) think of a name for the abstraction that now explains this.
Names are simply tools for communication. And communication is about identifying your public and then speaking a language they understand and like.
Marks out of 10 for your communication with Slashdot... 8 for getting onto the front page, 2 for content.
"...a transition to Open Document will force Microsoft to make changes to their business practices that will amount to discrimination against their blind lust for money and therefore they are lobbying hard to buy the voices of the blind and those with other disabilities."
The principle can be extended to GUI applications, this is what tools like Qt are for. But yes, server-side code has a more focussed set of needs - sockets, process control, threading, mutexes, database access, etc.
For GUI code, a VM obviously makes sense since performance is not usually the key thing. By "performance" I don't mean doing a fast screen refresh, I mean getting 10k-100k messages per second through a server.
The arguments for/against writing portable code are very old, and come down to people who say, "it's too slow, it can't do such-and-such, it's too complex," on the one hand, and people who do it, and profit, on the other. Basically *anywhere* you can make your code more portable, you will win. The longest-lived applications are the most portable ones.
Interestingly, the main argument against VMs is that when the vendor or development team changes the VM, you're screwed. With a portability layer you don't care.
My team's been writing 100% portable C code since 1991 or so. We took the same approach that Apache has done since version 2, i.e. build a distinct portability library and remove all non-portable code from the application itself.
It's amazing anyone would actually write non-portable code except through ignorance. As a programmer, I still run code written in 1991-2 (though it's been marginalised by newer work), and we have made some quite complex products (web servers, code generators) that run on anything that has standard C libraries and BSD-style TCP/IP, including OS/2, OpenVMS, and of course all Unix and Windows boxes.
The alternative option is to use a VM. Since we write fast system software that's not an option.
A wise person taught me this over 20 years ago: life is too short to throw out code just because some platform changed. Portability is one of those skills that lets a normal programmer like me accumulate enough quality code over time to become a master programmer.
The kind of idiocy written by those in favour of software patents has nothing to do with block votes. It has to do with money, lots and lots of money, and the surprising effect this has on "journalists". Calling the FFII "communists" is a strange attack but then you have to realise that the author is Polish, and the Polish MEPs were one of the most single-minded blocks to vote against software patents.
Software patents are being pushed hard by a rich, powerful, and ammoral machine built from lawyers, lobbyists, and large misguided software firms that have been beguiled by the arms race.
Voting for Florian will send a strong signal that software patents are not a popular legal innovation but are rightly seen as a threat to the free market and open capitalism.
Thanks for understanding my concept. The "cost of the thing" is relative to its volume. If one can sell a billion, one can sell them *very* cheaply. I estimate as low as $7-10 for the product, and the rest for airtime and profit. It is 100% existing technology. Nothing special. Every part can be made in a factory in China, and $20 would include an indecent profit for the seller and the opco.
Sigh. The world will continue to see gadgets made by technophiles, pushed to an unwilling public. Gadgets are fun and cool but most, most people don't go for them. Most people - at least half and probably 60-70% - have it hard just figuring out how to make toast.
Well, it should be possible to squeeze the electronics and battery into a thing about 2"x1"x0.5". If a cheap mobile costs $50 now, then removing screen and keyboard and associated hardware should bring the cost down further. It does not a large battery, since it'll only be switched on to call the one number it's programmed to call.
Now, if I could buy such a thing today, I'd be putting *my* number on it and handing it out as a kind of interactive business card.
"Example: I don't like the sound of nails being scratched over a blackboard. Therefore, nails on board is not popular".
It's a poor way to discuss my idea. I actually like all-in-one phones. Mine takes pictures, has a full keyboard, and lots of little gadgets. Still, if I had the capital, I'd be making and selling these little phones myself.
No, the Nokia 1100 does not fit my description (though I agree it's a good model). I'd like to see the screen and keyboard dropped, and the size and cost reduced much further, to the point where you can buy these things by the dozen, where a two-year old can use them, where companies will literally give them away as promotional material, where people will collect them like baubles. If Nokia made such a device they would sell billions of them, and I don't think this is exaggeration.
It's close but still too large and too expensive. I'd like to be able to give out smart business cards with my number on them to my clients, random good looking ladies, aged relatives, etc.
Nokia has dropped the ball and are believing their own marketing fluff. No-one actually wants a Carl Zeiss lense on their phone. No-one cares how good the optics are on a phone. Optics snobs buy cameras.
Seriously - rather than trying to turn phones into appliances, Nokia should learn from Apple and see that what people want are tiny, elegantly simple gadgets that do just one thing and do it very well. Instead of a phone costing $900, make one costing $20, and you can expect people to buy many.
Carries a single number and dials this when it's switched on. About the size of a fat CF card. Pretty colors. Very cheap - $10-20. I wrote this idea up on: http://www.shouldexist.org/.
I'm not justifying piracy, I'm saying the problem is not about piracy, it's about overpriced, out-of-date products.
Did you actually read my posting, or are you simply attempting to divert my argument back to the wedge issue that I clearly identified?
So long as Hollywood tries to force people to pay over the top for movies, there will be pirates. This seems obvious, and any discussion about whether piracy is "good" or "bad", whether it's "theft" or "copyright violation" is a waste of time. It's the question itself that is misleading. There is no good answer except to change the way movies are sold and provide a product that people will be glad to pay for. It's basic sense. Charge a couple of dollars to download a good quality movie, from a reliable network, and people will for the most part happily pay for the real thing rather than muck around with fakes.
As for boycotts, I'm serious. Rosa Parks started a boycott that lasted almost a year. It was the only way that the community could fight against an oppressive regime.
And yes, this is about civil rights. Maybe you've missed this, but over the last decade the pendulum has started to swing towards a regime in which all content is property, and all unauthorised access is a crime.
Let's connect the dots, shall we?
1. Take communal property.
2. Become owner of this property.
3. Rent back to original owners.
4. Profit.
No-one honestly cares about a few B-grade movies. The grand prize is a lock-down of the world's cultural, genetic, and technological heritage, and every court case of this nature pushes the law further towards corporate policeman and further away from protector of the community.
But heck, interpret this as a vote for piracy if you want to!
Such court cases only happen because the movie industry pressures courts and law enforcement, presumably with some support from U.S. trade or diplomatic channels. Now, the clever thing about such court cases is that they focus on the black/white legality of an action, and ignore the wider ramifications. Very typical of the divide and rule approach. You are either for the movie industry, or you are for thr pirates. This is what Fox TV calls a "wedge issue" and it's a clever way of keeping people divided while avoiding useful debate.
It is a false issue, and anyone discussing whether "piracy is right or wrong" is falling into the trap.
What most people actually are for is a better way of getting content. We don't like thieves. We don't like stealing. But we find paying $50-$100 to take the family to the movies unjustly expensive.
The movie, music and TV industry has to give its customers what they want, or they will - court cases or not - lose those customers.
And the simple solution, by the way, is to boycott Holywood, and boycott the record labels that sponsor the RIAA. Consumers do not have much power, but - as Rosa Parks demonstrated - even the most humble of us can refuse to give our money to those that would mistreat us.
I am OLUSEGUN OBASANJO, the current president of Nigeria, a country in West Africa. I have been referred to you after Conducting Enquiries, and I hope you treat this contact as a sincere and confidential message from a friend. Contacts through the Internet have become difficult, with many scammers and tricky boys.
It recently came to my notice that my predecessor, General SANI ABACHA, who is still in good heart and health, despite my daily visits to the leopard fetish, left a large number of TOP QUALITY SCAMMERS alive and well in the country of Nigeria, especially concentrated in two regions: Lagos, and Port Harcourt, thanks to the presence of many internet cafes in those regions.
These scammers, also known as "419 boyos", present me, and my present regime, with a problem. We cannot ship them out of the country legally, since the very presence of such a mass of scammers in any single plane or aiport lounge would cause the substance and material of the local internet to collapse, not to mention the local economy, which would surely be drained of all resources as the boyos did their work.
I am actually contacting you because I have understood that Microsoft has certain problems that we may be able to resolve in a beneficial fashion.
My Minister for International Relations, Dr Shine-Shine BOBO, has overseen a series of tests. We have compared the top-rated business development consultants from the USA, India, the UK (London), and the Chinese Economic Development Zone. We found that the average time taken to sell a new license of Windows VISTA to the average ITC manager was between two hours and five days, according to the economic incentives offered, the availability of compromising photos of the aforementioned manager, and the presence or not of on-site "sales assistants", most of whom previously worked as security personnel for Russian businessmen.
Next, Dr BOBO tested the skills of a group of 419 boyos, captured in a lighting raid by the Special Business Improvement Task Force (Armed) last July in Benin city. We gave them the choice of selling VISTA or being tortured with chili peppers (this has worked very well for tax collection, and the Ministry of Finance has now a special Pepper Insertion unit, responsible for a 30% increase in tax revenues since 2003!). Most chose VISTA, and the results were impressive!
Not only did 80% of managers agree to buy VISTA within 1.5 hours (as compared to 30% after three hours, and 60% after two days), but these managers also agreed to pay an average of $150,000 per licensed seat.
Dear MR slash MISS CHAIRMAN. I do not need to mention that with virtual licensing, this could raise as much as $600,000 per computer.
We are willing to provide you with our best 419 boyos in exchange for only 10% of this new and exciting revenue stream.
Please contact me rapidly, my email address is obasanjo_olegun_the_second@gmail.com. If you are serious in your intentions, I will invite you to Abuja to meet my wives.
It seems that a large part of the "intellectual property" debate is about building an American IP imperium. Of course, US courts will judge with impartiality this case whatever the nationality of the companies involved. It's unimaginable that a US court would favour a US company over a Canadian one, since US courts are completely immune from the kinds of political pressure that might cause this. LMAO.
The point is this: as manufacturing, and R&D, and services, move out of the US and into China, India, and the rest of Asia, the only way the US can maintain some control over the world economy of the next decades is by IP-squatting. Patents and Mickey-mouse copyrights are the tools, control of global trade is the goal. It's a clear political goal, proven by the way IP-squatting is pushed into every "trade deal" the US signs ("we will buy your soybeans if you accept our IP laws").
RIM made a success in a market that should have belonged to a US firm. That's reason enough to kneecap them.
We are presumably discussing the Internet as an international network, and here the answer is obviously, "no-one can own this", because ownership will mean subversion of the Internet for political goals and thus its destruction.
But if we mean the millions of small and large (e.g. China) internets, each of these can and probably should be owned.
The problem of root DNS servers appears to be an artificial one, relatively easily solved if there was the political will to relinquish control and allow the free creation of arbitrary top level names. There are parallels where control has successfully been relinquished and the results are a nice mix of anarchy and order, suiting everyone. Newsnet is a good example.
Taken literally, this is exactly what I do now when I click the "Word Processor" icon.
Assuming that Google is not moving into the software distribution business, the implication is that they will provide some kind of web-based access to OpenOffice. But this raises more questions than it answers. What kind of access? AJAX cannot exactly be retrofitted onto existing applications. Perhaps some kind of remove access? If so, why specifically OpenOffice? Surely it would imply remote access to any random application running on Google's network somewhere. And where would my documents be stored?
The idea is not unattractive, provided it can run quickly. I have switched entirely from PC-based email to gmail, and it is true that for many projects, it's annoying to have to carry documents with me, or use something like svn, which is non-trivial to setup.
But lacking so many vital details, this story sounds like a hoax or a misreport.
Slashdot Mirror
When Google invoices you for clicks, a share of this money is going to sites that are showing the ads. There are sites that fraudulently drive clicks in order to get more money.
When my firm used adwords, we saw our monthly fees from Google climbing steadily, from $10-20 per month to over $1000, but with no matching increase in traffic, and almost zero contacts via our web site (which was clearly aimed only at Belgian customers). We estimated that 95% of the clicks were fraudulent. We had no way of checking who was clicking on our site. So we cancelled the program and focussed on more traditional sales.
This is, IMO, one of the major skeletons lurking in Google's cupboard.
First, the rate of usage is about 100 per 1000 people, in the US.
Second, anti-depressants do not prevent suicide and in some cases appear to even increase suicide rates.
Third, anti-depressants are a major money earner for drugs companies, who continously need to develop new drugs as older ones become commoditized.
That is what this study is about... setting the stage for new anti-SAD drugs. This is big pharma marketing.
What's the point here? Perhaps that a huge majority of people who take anti-depressants are actually being abused. I hardly think this is a radical statement: it's just valium all over again.
For many people, their drug is their problem.
My list of cures basically comes down to "get a life" and although I've every faith that drugs can solve some problems, they should be the last solution, not the first.
Rosenthal is hopeful that studies, like those with the hamsters at OSU, may help yield more effective drugs for those most affected by SAD...
It it about developing "more effective drugs". These studies are sponsored by drugs companies.
The European Commission and Parliament have done a deal which looks set to introduce a law that makes this kind of tracking a daily part of police work.
The "Data Retention Directive" proposes tracking all mobile phone and Internet usage, and storing this for 2 years, and (worst) making it available to police and other parties (possibly commercial ones), without much regard to existing privacy laws.
There is an FFII press release on this subject: http://wiki.ffii.de/DataRetPr051205En.
The FFII and EDRI are fighting this in the Parliament, but the directive has been shoved through very brutally by the Council, led by the UK. Basically the bureaucrats of the Commission, unhindered by any European Constitution, are creating laws by stealth, and this Big Brother directive is symptomatic of a take over of the national legislative processes by an group of unelected, unaccountable officials.
The UK Presidency had proposed a very brutal law, which went as far as requiring the logging of the MAC address of every computer connected to the Internet (yes, that blew me away too), and using the Good Cop/ Bad Cop approach, bullied the Parliament into accepting a "compromise" agreement that dropped all the references to terrorism, and added a bunch of waffle about human rights, but basically creates a pan-European database of every cellphone call, and every Internet communication. I've not yet had time to see whether TCP/IP end-points are also logged, but the original proposals definitely requested this.
Europe is rapidly turning into a police state that makes the US look like a haven of freedom and civil rights. The rejection of the European Constitution by the French and Dutch voters, though a nicely symbolic act, have left a power vacuum into which the grey bureaucrats of the Commission have stepped.
Let's see... cage up some hamsters, deprive them of natural light, natural surroundings, and buddies, give them an artificial sucrose-laden diet, see how they get depressed, give them drugs to make them happy?
And then suggest that these results could apply to people? Brave New World, anyone?
Drugs. will. not. fix. you.
Get out of your cage, get into the open, make better relationships, find a job that respects you, stop moving home every couple of years, start talking to your family not shouting at them, eat decent food instead of that sugar-laden "lo-fat" junk you're stuffing your face with, stop watching TV, cut down on the booze, and the religion, and for baby jesus' sake, stop taking artificial drugs.
...as my right hand takes your wallet.
Cue the debate about US job losses and globalisation. The real issue IMO is the Microsoft tactics of using trade pressure to lobby for anti-competition legislation. "Yes, I'll invest 1.8bn, but only if you ban free software and enable software patents".
The truth is that India is capable of doing a lot better without this kind of "help". I encourage Indian politicians to reject any such pressure. Indian IT can compete securely on the open market, without favours or protectionism. Software patents, and other anti-competitive laws will only hurt India in the medium and long term.
This would be great in tropical countries. Mosquito-borne malaria is one of those diseases that affects a huge number of people (a majority in many countries), which is non-fatal but debilitating. It makes you sick every few months, and you spend a week or so in a terrible fever. Sometimes it's fatal but mostly it just makes people very weak, unable to concentrate on useful work, and so on.
Of course there are hundreds of other diseases that weigh down people living in tropical countries but malaria is one of the big ones. Keeping mosquitos away from places where people live would be a great thing. I just hope the technology will become cheap enough to work in rural Africa.
"No good choices" is pretty pessimistic. "Type Manager" is not just a well-known category of software, as many people have explained, it's most likely a trademark. Very poor choice.
I'm not convinced by your argument that this class of interface is worth having but for the sake of argument, let me suggest some better names...
- Content agent, content browser, content viewer, content app, etc.
- File manager skin, plugin, addon, etc.
- Minibrowser, microbrowser, etc.
- Smart explorer, l'il genius, dinkum toys, widgets, etc.
It'd help a lot if you:
(a) define the actual abstraction you're thinking of. What is it... a mini application, a plugin to a web browser or file manager, what exactly?
(b) define a bunch of real and plausible examples.
(c) think of who will actually want to use these.
(d) think of a name for the abstraction that now explains this.
Names are simply tools for communication. And communication is about identifying your public and then speaking a language they understand and like.
Marks out of 10 for your communication with Slashdot... 8 for getting onto the front page, 2 for content.
What it actually says is:
"...a transition to Open Document will force Microsoft to make changes to their business practices that will amount to discrimination against their blind lust for money and therefore they are lobbying hard to buy the voices of
the blind and those with other disabilities."
The principle can be extended to GUI applications, this is what tools like Qt are for. But yes, server-side code has a more focussed set of needs - sockets, process control, threading, mutexes, database access, etc.
For GUI code, a VM obviously makes sense since performance is not usually the key thing. By "performance" I don't mean doing a fast screen refresh, I mean getting 10k-100k messages per second through a server.
The arguments for/against writing portable code are very old, and come down to people who say, "it's too slow, it can't do such-and-such, it's too complex," on the one hand, and people who do it, and profit, on the other. Basically *anywhere* you can make your code more portable, you will win. The longest-lived applications are the most portable ones.
Interestingly, the main argument against VMs is that when the vendor or development team changes the VM, you're screwed. With a portability layer you don't care.
My team's been writing 100% portable C code since 1991 or so. We took the same approach that Apache has done since version 2, i.e. build a distinct portability library and remove all non-portable code from the application itself.
It's amazing anyone would actually write non-portable code except through ignorance. As a programmer, I still run code written in 1991-2 (though it's been marginalised by newer work), and we have made some quite complex products (web servers, code generators) that run on anything that has standard C libraries and BSD-style TCP/IP, including OS/2, OpenVMS, and of course all Unix and Windows boxes.
The alternative option is to use a VM. Since we write fast system software that's not an option.
A wise person taught me this over 20 years ago: life is too short to throw out code just because some platform changed. Portability is one of those skills that lets a normal programmer like me accumulate enough quality code over time to become a master programmer.
The kind of idiocy written by those in favour of software patents has nothing to do with block votes. It has to do with money, lots and lots of money, and the surprising effect this has on "journalists". Calling the FFII "communists" is a strange attack but then you have to realise that the author is Polish, and the Polish MEPs were one of the most single-minded blocks to vote against software patents.
Software patents are being pushed hard by a rich, powerful, and ammoral machine built from lawyers, lobbyists, and large misguided software firms that have been beguiled by the arms race.
Voting for Florian will send a strong signal that software patents are not a popular legal innovation but are rightly seen as a threat to the free market and open capitalism.
Thanks for understanding my concept. The "cost of the thing" is relative to its volume. If one can sell a billion, one can sell them *very* cheaply. I estimate as low as $7-10 for the product, and the rest for airtime and profit. It is 100% existing technology. Nothing special. Every part can be made in a factory in China, and $20 would include an indecent profit for the seller and the opco.
Sigh. The world will continue to see gadgets made by technophiles, pushed to an unwilling public. Gadgets are fun and cool but most, most people don't go for them. Most people - at least half and probably 60-70% - have it hard just figuring out how to make toast.
Well, it should be possible to squeeze the electronics and battery into a thing about 2"x1"x0.5". If a cheap mobile costs $50 now, then removing screen and keyboard and associated hardware should bring the cost down further. It does not a large battery, since it'll only be switched on to call the one number it's programmed to call.
Now, if I could buy such a thing today, I'd be putting *my* number on it and handing it out as a kind of interactive business card.
"Example: I don't like the sound of nails being scratched over a blackboard. Therefore, nails on board is not popular".
It's a poor way to discuss my idea. I actually like all-in-one phones. Mine takes pictures, has a full keyboard, and lots of little gadgets. Still, if I had the capital, I'd be making and selling these little phones myself.
No, the Nokia 1100 does not fit my description (though I agree it's a good model). I'd like to see the screen and keyboard dropped, and the size and cost reduced much further, to the point where you can buy these things by the dozen, where a two-year old can use them, where companies will literally give them away as promotional material, where people will collect them like baubles. If Nokia made such a device they would sell billions of them, and I don't think this is exaggeration.
It's close but still too large and too expensive. I'd like to be able to give out smart business cards with my number on them to my clients, random good looking ladies, aged relatives, etc.
Nokia has dropped the ball and are believing their own marketing fluff. No-one actually wants a Carl Zeiss lense on their phone. No-one cares how good the optics are on a phone. Optics snobs buy cameras.
Seriously - rather than trying to turn phones into appliances, Nokia should learn from Apple and see that what people want are tiny, elegantly simple gadgets that do just one thing and do it very well. Instead of a phone costing $900, make one costing $20, and you can expect people to buy many.
How about a phone stripped down to just:
- GSM module
- speaker
- mike
- battery
- on/off button
Carries a single number and dials this when it's switched on. About the size of a fat CF card. Pretty colors. Very cheap - $10-20. I wrote this idea up on: http://www.shouldexist.org/.
I'm not justifying piracy, I'm saying the problem is not about piracy, it's about overpriced, out-of-date products.
Did you actually read my posting, or are you simply attempting to divert my argument back to the wedge issue that I clearly identified?
So long as Hollywood tries to force people to pay over the top for movies, there will be pirates. This seems obvious, and any discussion about whether piracy is "good" or "bad", whether it's "theft" or "copyright violation" is a waste of time. It's the question itself that is misleading. There is no good answer except to change the way movies are sold and provide a product that people will be glad to pay for. It's basic sense. Charge a couple of dollars to download a good quality movie, from a reliable network, and people will for the most part happily pay for the real thing rather than muck around with fakes.
As for boycotts, I'm serious. Rosa Parks started a boycott that lasted almost a year. It was the only way that the community could fight against an oppressive regime.
And yes, this is about civil rights. Maybe you've missed this, but over the last decade the pendulum has started to swing towards a regime in which all content is property, and all unauthorised access is a crime.
Let's connect the dots, shall we?
1. Take communal property.
2. Become owner of this property.
3. Rent back to original owners.
4. Profit.
No-one honestly cares about a few B-grade movies. The grand prize is a lock-down of the world's cultural, genetic, and technological heritage, and every court case of this nature pushes the law further towards corporate policeman and further away from protector of the community.
But heck, interpret this as a vote for piracy if you want to!
Such court cases only happen because the movie industry pressures courts and law enforcement, presumably with some support from U.S. trade or diplomatic channels. Now, the clever thing about such court cases is that they focus on the black/white legality of an action, and ignore the wider ramifications. Very typical of the divide and rule approach. You are either for the movie industry, or you are for thr pirates. This is what Fox TV calls a "wedge issue" and it's a clever way of keeping people divided while avoiding useful debate.
It is a false issue, and anyone discussing whether "piracy is right or wrong" is falling into the trap.
What most people actually are for is a better way of getting content. We don't like thieves. We don't like stealing. But we find paying $50-$100 to take the family to the movies unjustly expensive.
The movie, music and TV industry has to give its customers what they want, or they will - court cases or not - lose those customers.
And the simple solution, by the way, is to boycott Holywood, and boycott the record labels that sponsor the RIAA. Consumers do not have much power, but - as Rosa Parks demonstrated - even the most humble of us can refuse to give our money to those that would mistreat us.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define+edifac t&btnG=Google+Search
Significantly older than 1997, and achieved the same goals as XML, though much less elegantly.
To the CHAIRMAN of MICROSOFT CORPORATION
Dear MR or MISS CHAIRMAN,
I am OLUSEGUN OBASANJO, the current president of Nigeria, a country in West Africa. I have been referred
to you after Conducting Enquiries, and I hope you treat this contact as a sincere and confidential message
from a friend. Contacts through the Internet have become difficult, with many scammers and tricky boys.
It recently came to my notice that my predecessor, General SANI ABACHA, who is still in good heart and
health, despite my daily visits to the leopard fetish, left a large number of TOP QUALITY SCAMMERS alive
and well in the country of Nigeria, especially concentrated in two regions: Lagos, and Port Harcourt,
thanks to the presence of many internet cafes in those regions.
These scammers, also known as "419 boyos", present me, and my present regime, with a problem. We cannot
ship them out of the country legally, since the very presence of such a mass of scammers in any single
plane or aiport lounge would cause the substance and material of the local internet to collapse, not
to mention the local economy, which would surely be drained of all resources as the boyos did their work.
I am actually contacting you because I have understood that Microsoft has certain problems that we may
be able to resolve in a beneficial fashion.
My Minister for International Relations, Dr Shine-Shine BOBO, has overseen a series of tests. We have
compared the top-rated business development consultants from the USA, India, the UK (London), and the
Chinese Economic Development Zone. We found that the average time taken to sell a new license of Windows
VISTA to the average ITC manager was between two hours and five days, according to the economic incentives
offered, the availability of compromising photos of the aforementioned manager, and the presence or not of
on-site "sales assistants", most of whom previously worked as security personnel for Russian businessmen.
Next, Dr BOBO tested the skills of a group of 419 boyos, captured in a lighting raid by the Special
Business Improvement Task Force (Armed) last July in Benin city. We gave them the choice of selling
VISTA or being tortured with chili peppers (this has worked very well for tax collection, and the
Ministry of Finance has now a special Pepper Insertion unit, responsible for a 30% increase in tax
revenues since 2003!). Most chose VISTA, and the results were impressive!
Not only did 80% of managers agree to buy VISTA within 1.5 hours (as compared to 30% after three hours,
and 60% after two days), but these managers also agreed to pay an average of $150,000 per licensed seat.
Dear MR slash MISS CHAIRMAN. I do not need to mention that with virtual licensing, this could raise
as much as $600,000 per computer.
We are willing to provide you with our best 419 boyos in exchange for only 10% of this new and
exciting revenue stream.
Please contact me rapidly, my email address is obasanjo_olegun_the_second@gmail.com. If you are
serious in your intentions, I will invite you to Abuja to meet my wives.
BEST REGARDS
O. OBASANJO
It seems that a large part of the "intellectual property" debate is about building an American IP imperium. Of course, US courts will judge with impartiality this case whatever the nationality of the companies involved. It's unimaginable that a US court would favour a US company over a Canadian one, since US courts are completely immune from the kinds of political pressure that might cause this. LMAO.
The point is this: as manufacturing, and R&D, and services, move out of the US and into China, India, and the rest of Asia, the only way the US can maintain some control over the world economy of the next decades is by IP-squatting. Patents and Mickey-mouse copyrights are the tools, control of global trade is the goal. It's a clear political goal, proven by the way IP-squatting is pushed into every "trade deal" the US signs ("we will buy your soybeans if you accept our IP laws").
RIM made a success in a market that should have belonged to a US firm. That's reason enough to kneecap them.
We are presumably discussing the Internet as an international network, and here the answer is obviously, "no-one can own this", because ownership will mean subversion of the Internet for political goals and thus its destruction.
But if we mean the millions of small and large (e.g. China) internets, each of these can and probably should be owned.
The problem of root DNS servers appears to be an artificial one, relatively easily solved if there was the political will to relinquish control and allow the free creation of arbitrary top level names. There are parallels where control has successfully been relinquished and the results are a nice mix of anarchy and order, suiting everyone. Newsnet is a good example.
"Launch OpenOffice from the toolbar"...?
Taken literally, this is exactly what I do now when I click the "Word Processor" icon.
Assuming that Google is not moving into the software distribution business, the implication is that they will provide some kind of web-based access to OpenOffice. But this raises more questions than it answers. What kind of access? AJAX cannot exactly be retrofitted onto existing applications. Perhaps some kind of remove access? If so, why specifically OpenOffice? Surely it would imply remote access to any random application running on Google's network somewhere. And where would my documents be stored?
The idea is not unattractive, provided it can run quickly. I have switched entirely from PC-based email to gmail, and it is true that for many projects, it's annoying to have to carry documents with me, or use something like svn, which is non-trivial to setup.
But lacking so many vital details, this story sounds like a hoax or a misreport.