Let's say you accumulate items worth say $1000 if you sold them - does the act of accumulating them cause the income or does it exist only if sold? Can you deduct the cost of playing? What happens if you trade an item in game? Did you just create a sale?
While this may seem trivial, those are the type of issues I see the IRS struggling with when deciding what constitute income and when is it earned.
Personally, if no cash or other goods of value are traded only online and not for cash or other goods / services in the real world then in my mind no income was earned. The IRS may take a different view.; especially if you barter a game item for something tangible in the real world.
As to your last part, I'm tired of that damned argument. These kids willingly joined the army, yes to pay for college, but they were told repeatedly and voluntarily swore an oath (no fucking fine print) that when the U.S. goes to war, they will probably have to ship off and if that is the case, there is nothing they can do about it. I feel little sympathy for these kids, I mean it sucks over there but you did sign up with the military, what did you expect? Why didn't you go for the National Guard, hmm? Your chances of being deployed over seas to hostile combat zone are dramatically reduced in that organization.
While I agree with your sentiment (Queen's shilling, after all) The NG is not the place to avoid combat (not that that is why people join the Guard). Look at the deployments and the Guard is right up there with their reserve and regular counterparts. More reservists may go but the NG s a big part of the Army these days. One weekend a month and two weeks over the summer my ass.
What this is doing is once again bring the real cost of the war home to Americans across the spectrum - it's not just a bunch of poor kids' parents but the soccer moms and dads who are seeing their son/daughter/husband/wife or neighbor go to war - which is changing the political landscape. That is a good thing (no matter what side you are on politically because it brings a better understanding of the military and the cost of employing them. We (the US) has traditionally had a citizen Army who was connected to its populace - we need to keep that tie strong.
If Tesco can do this in the U.K., why can't Wal-Mart do it here? Or Costco? Or BestBuy? Or Fry's?
Tesco no doubt has a long history of private label merchandise so they have an established brand that buyers trust and the experience needed to make such a system work.
Most US electronics retailers are retailers (CompUSA has a house brand and BB has some thin variant on that) who simply resell goods.
Now, if one of the OSS vendors decided to offer private label versions of the software then they may get some traction with the big box vendors. The key is to price it at a point where it doesn't steal sales form the higher margin products, or price it so you actually get a better margin off of the cheaper stuff and hope you move a lot. Personally, I'd price it so I make as much in profit off of genericOFFICE (tm) as real office - if I got $10 for the real thing I'd price genericOFFICE (TM) at cost plus 10 dollars. at that point, absent MS or other vendor incentives, I don't care which product I sell.
Interestingly, it's a marketting term - it has no legal meaning per the FDA, which is why cosmetic companies feel free to use it; they are not saying you won't be allergic to this or that any FDA approved testing has been done. Yet people think it means something so they buy hypoallergenic products.
As one marketeer put it during a presentation - "My job is great - I sell a product that is 90% air and people pay a premium for it!!"
5 hours? Hardly. USB puts out 5volts at 500mah. Step that down and do the math. 1.5 volts at around roughly 1500+mah? Hour maybe max charging time for the weaker model
According to the article and the manufacturers specs, it takes 5 hours to fully charge a flat cell; that's not an unrealistic number given a regular charger that puts out.5 maH can take 4 plus hours to charge a cell.
Useless junk.
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's see - 5 hours to charge so you either leave a laptop on and run it's battery dead - wait - that little 3 prong hole in the wall - AC power - I can plug my laptop in there save its battery or I can plug in a real battery charger and fast charge my much cheaper, higher capacity AA/AAA's.
A battery charger is small, small, lightweight and can be has with dual voltage. Mine is 6 years old and weighs a few ounces - including cord and EU adapter.
If you really don't want to carry a charger you can buy a dozen high capacity rechargable AA's at the price of these - and simply carry them with you. (If you really would use that many you probably would carry a charger anyway).
This is an expensive answer to a question no one is asking.
College should be about learning, not socializing, binge drinking, wanton promiscuity, or what have you.
All of that is part of learning, especially the socializing. The idea that the only learning comes from sitting in a classroom while a professor talks is ridiculous. Some of my most interesting discussions were around a white board in the pub while we drank and played foosball; and argued economics. In addition, the network you connect with will be available for life.
Somewhere along the way, it became accepted that every single person had to graduate from college to be successful and it became an extension of high school. Then all the immature and ignorant kids left their uptight parents' house, and lacking anything better to do (15 hours of class is a full load?) turned it into Animal House.
The problem is that other types of learning - such as apprenticeships and trade schools, have been discounted as somehow less valuable. Some of it is the pace of technological advancement - you used to be able to take a high school dropout that was good with mechanical things and turn them into a decent mechanic; today they need to understand computers, electronics and much more; so the bar has been raised there as well.
That along the idea of bullshit "core courses" being required for me to get a "well rounded" education is precisely why I don't have a college degree. I'm getting along fine without it and refuse to put up with 4 years of High School Part 2 just to get to graduate school. Books don't get any less informative just because they're not being regurgitated onto a chalkboard for you.
Part of a well rounded education is to produce citizens who understand the world around them and can think for themsleves. When I interview someone I ask questions that are designed to see if I would want to sit next to this person for 6 hours on a plane - if the answer is no I don't care how good their technical skills are they get a thumbs down. Harsh? Maybe, but that's life.
Many IV league schools no longer accept AP credits. They want you to get an education from THEIR institution. If you enroll into a school with 72 credits, about half of your university education doesn't even come from the university you attended. This is why many schools are following the examples of the IV league institutions.
While that may be their argument, I doubt few people enroll with enough credits to make much of a difference. If they did allow people to skip say a year, that would however have a significant financial impact as students matriculate early and they lose 1/4 of the expected tuition.
scratched? I have a collection of records dating from my high school years (pre - cd) and the biggest problem with vinyl is durability. The act of playing wears them, not to mention the scratches and other damage that often occurs. Ripping a pristine copy played on a high quality turntable with a top notch needle would eliminate much of the wear problem.
Still, there's something to be said for putting a record on a turntable, turn it by hand to get to the start of the song and then back off just enough so you can accurately time the start when broadcasting.
As far as I know, Google have never had a problem with de-listing any site that didn't want their content searching/caching (and I seem to remember back in the early days before search really took off, a lot of sites requested the spider didn't crawl them as it could kill their bandwidth pretty quickly).
Copyright owners do of course have the right to ask that their content not be listed (and failure to use a robots.txt shouldn't imply they're giving up that right), but I'd like to know if these sites just asked Google to delist them or if they immediately went running to the courts.
It's sounds like the issue was caching sites, not the merely listing them; but my ability to comprehend Dutch is limited and so I had a hard time reading the article.
I'm guessing Google nuked them to avoid paying the penalties while they sort this out; personally I think the Google cache will eventually disappear because of copyright issues. Personally I like it because it keeps alive some very old stuff I had written and published; and so provides a sort of history of the web service like the old way back machine.
If you do give people your content, then accept that it's going to be used like everything else published on the web.
That's the crux of the problem - the web has changed how easy it is to violate copyrights; and now the copyright holders are fighting back since there is potentially serious money involved.
I'm sure they don't consider themselves to give anyone anything other than the ability to view content as they serve it up via browser - Google's caching changes that and involves using their material.
It's like some sites that fought framing of websites - a site takes your content and builds a new page from it; generally to add in ads. The bottom line is sites still have rights to their content and copyright holders have the right to control its use. Far too many people seem to think simply because something is on the web it is free to use; I've had to educate programmers when they grab a picture or two and incorporate them in our content - I need to know where they got it and who is the copyright holder and make sure we have permission to use it.
Of course they have a right to exert control over it. But as a standard, most places would like their content indexed (how much work would it take to have an opt-in for every subdirectory on a site where content may belong to different authors?). If they don't, as has happened, they stated "We do not want Google to index our pages without paying us lots of money, as google make money off the indexing and finding", and Google promptly took them out of the News and Search. Now, they have exactly what they asked for. Google will make nothing from them.
The issue, as it appears (I have a hard time reading Dutch, is not indexing but caching - i.e. republishing the papers material.
Sure Google is uping the ante, but as a long term strategy it is unsustainable. Google can't shut off everyone that complains because it means they become increasingly irrelevant.
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
The point is that copyright owners still have a right to exert control over their copyrights; whether or not they use a robots.txt file. Searching and displaying results is different from caching and offering up the content independent of the original site - in the former Google is not redistributing the material but acting like a research librarian - something the site may want; but once the stuff is pulled then Google can't offer it up unless they have permission.
As you said - they are their to be visited, which is what a search supports.
This could be the tip of teh iceberg - given the increased desire to make money off of web content; which means limiting free access through such things as Google cache.
I know it may sound odd but just to get access to the list of software that is "approved" is a lesson in bureaucratic absurdity; forget actually submitting something to get "approved".
Having gone through the approval process (DoD but not NMCI) to have several programs my company created I feel your pain. Conflicting requirements, forms that even the approving authority weren't sure how to fill out, changing program managers mid stream so you had to renegotiate any exceptions previously agreed upon were only some of the roadblocks. The biggest one is anyone in the chain can insist that the software must meet some requirement they deem important and stall the process.
My boss, who has zero DoD experience, sis not believe me when I said the process will take years (it did) because she was used to a corporate environment where a VP could say do this and it would get done - most people don't realize a mid level grunt has more power in the DoD than in the corporate world; if only because if something goes wrong they'll pull out the memo where they said "this won't work" and it's the boss, not them, on the hot seat.
The good thing is the PM's I worked with truly believed in making sure the grunt in the field got a good product that would do what they needed.
They are an orginisation attempting to make money with content including copyrighted material, which the copyright holders are legally entitled to recompense. But their business model is more like the modern day equivalent of a tv station, so they should be paying in a similar way to how tv stations pay for their use of copyrighted material.
I think you've confused marketeers with economists. Economists (at least the smart ones) ask a fundemnetal question:
This activity occurs at the expense of what?
Evert transaction occurs at the expense of another - if I buy a sweater then I don't buy a TV. You can't just look at any one action but need to look at the impact of that action.
Politicians and marketeers trumpet job creation - those pork barrel projects - they create jobs and pump taxes back into the economy (which I will use to buy more votes) - forget what the original taxpayer might have done with the nmoney had we not taken it in taxes; spent some percent running the government (a deadweight load of sorts) and actually put less back in then we took out.
If Vista makes companies more productive then they can create more jobs - if not then teh net effect is zero (or less because of switching costs)
They are an orginisation attempting to make money with content including copyrighted material, which the copyright holders are legally entitled to recompense. But their business model is more like the modern day equivalent of a tv station, so they should be paying in a similar way to how tv stations pay for their use of copyrighted material.,/I>
Except a TV sation uses material whose creators have cleared teh copyrights and have the right to use the material. They pay the owners, not the TV station. In this case, I doubt if the creators of the stuff YouTube hosts have cleared teh copyrights, and since YouTube probably has more cash than their users the studio will go after them - it's easier and cheaper to sue one thing with a stack of cash and collect than thosuands with very little.
The social networking sites had to see this coming - they're trying to make money off of other's material and didn't expect to hear form a lwyer? The arguement that they are simply hosting the materila and not infringing is like the person selling bootlegs made by others claiming they're innoncent because all they are doing is passing out DVD's.
They are mor elike a bar that has music (live or recoreded) - they can pay a license fee for the material they host; based on audience size. That of course means that they either need to make money off of advertising or start charging users. If they can do that profitably, great; if not then they had a bad business model in which case it sucks to be them.
This is an example of the very rare Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress case that can actually win.
Depends on the jury, but this guy is absolutely liable.
Not for libel (I don't even know why people would suggest that).
I'd say IANAL, but I am.
Since he posted pictures; would he not also be open to a copyright claim? That would probably be more clear cut than one based on reposting an email. While the liability may be small, fighting several hundred cases could get expensive and be more damaging than the actual damages; especially if they are filed in different locations.
People have been building communities around games for quite some time - from play by mail games to play in real life (such as chess and bridge) to role playing (such as Chainmail and D&D); all without computers. They had factions, newsletters, magazines, romances, leaders, etc. - which mirrored "real life." Not that that was restricted to games - look at any hobby and you'll see similar social constructs. All that the computer did was expand the ease of reach - no more waiting for mail or conventions to "see' old friends.
It's somewhat amusing to think that computers and the internet somehow is creating new "stuff" that has never been before seen; when often all it does is increase accessibility.
An iPod and a PSP? Why not just the PSP? It plays music too, Sure it can't hold your entire library but does it need to?
A couple of reasons:
The iPod is smaller and easier to use if all I want is music.
I like to listen to a variety of music and don't want to buy a 4 gig card just yet; so the iPod's capacity is nice. If 1 gig wad enough I'd just use my Treo.
Once you start putting videos on the ipod and running movies on it, I think you'll quickly find that you lose that 8 hour battery life. If you have the harddrive spinning, and the screen on for the whole time, plus the processor working harder, because there's just so much more data to decode, then you're probably looking at a 2 hour battery life. Which still isn't bad, you could watch 1 movie, but probably not what a lot of people want. You could save on battery power by storing the movies on memory cards, and reading off there, but I suspect the screen would probably be too much of a drain to give the type of experience people expect from iPods.
I agree memory cards are better - I regularly get 6 plus hours off of my PSP with movies on MS; with flash so cheap you could put in the HD and 1 or 2 gigs of cache and just fetch and store the desired movie and shutdown the HD. A higher capacity battery would help as well; as would a removable one for those really long flights or trips.
Either way, a small portable movie viewer is what I see as the next big thing - especially with decent battery life and instant on]off/resume; video out would be nice as well. All around $250, BTW.
This is the SONY walkman all over again, then the SONY CD walkman... it's done. It's hard to imagine quantum leaps of coolness and convenience beyond an iPod or video iPod. The curve had to level, there just isn't any there there. Apple should be happy with what they've done, but I don't think this is a growth niche any longer.
I'd say an iPod with a PSP sized screen would be a hit, especially if it could play various standard video formats. I'd add a small SD slot as well to allow people to buy or rent movies on a card. With an 8 hour plus battery life I think it would be a hit with travelers. Right now I carry a PSP and my iPod, I'd love one device the size of an iPod with a PSP sized screen. Put the scroll wheel on the back (so you don't need an expensive touch screen) or via small buttons on the side and you'd have most of the case space devoted to the screen. My bet is Sony does it before Apple, though. There new mini portable is close, except that it has a non-replaceable battery, short life and is about $600 too expensive.
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Let's say you accumulate items worth say $1000 if you sold them - does the act of accumulating them cause the income or does it exist only if sold? Can you deduct the cost of playing? What happens if you trade an item in game? Did you just create a sale?
While this may seem trivial, those are the type of issues I see the IRS struggling with when deciding what constitute income and when is it earned.
Personally, if no cash or other goods of value are traded only online and not for cash or other goods / services in the real world then in my mind no income was earned. The IRS may take a different view.; especially if you barter a game item for something tangible in the real world.
As to your last part, I'm tired of that damned argument. These kids willingly joined the army, yes to pay for college, but they were told repeatedly and voluntarily swore an oath (no fucking fine print) that when the U.S. goes to war, they will probably have to ship off and if that is the case, there is nothing they can do about it. I feel little sympathy for these kids, I mean it sucks over there but you did sign up with the military, what did you expect? Why didn't you go for the National Guard, hmm? Your chances of being deployed over seas to hostile combat zone are dramatically reduced in that organization.
While I agree with your sentiment (Queen's shilling, after all) The NG is not the place to avoid combat (not that that is why people join the Guard). Look at the deployments and the Guard is right up there with their reserve and regular counterparts. More reservists may go but the NG s a big part of the Army these days. One weekend a month and two weeks over the summer my ass.
What this is doing is once again bring the real cost of the war home to Americans across the spectrum - it's not just a bunch of poor kids' parents but the soccer moms and dads who are seeing their son/daughter/husband/wife or neighbor go to war - which is changing the political landscape. That is a good thing (no matter what side you are on politically because it brings a better understanding of the military and the cost of employing them. We (the US) has traditionally had a citizen Army who was connected to its populace - we need to keep that tie strong.
If Tesco can do this in the U.K., why can't Wal-Mart do it here? Or Costco? Or BestBuy? Or Fry's?
Tesco no doubt has a long history of private label merchandise so they have an established brand that buyers trust and the experience needed to make such a system work.
Most US electronics retailers are retailers (CompUSA has a house brand and BB has some thin variant on that) who simply resell goods.
Now, if one of the OSS vendors decided to offer private label versions of the software then they may get some traction with the big box vendors. The key is to price it at a point where it doesn't steal sales form the higher margin products, or price it so you actually get a better margin off of the cheaper stuff and hope you move a lot. Personally, I'd price it so I make as much in profit off of genericOFFICE (tm) as real office - if I got $10 for the real thing I'd price genericOFFICE (TM) at cost plus 10 dollars. at that point, absent MS or other vendor incentives, I don't care which product I sell.
Interestingly, it's a marketting term - it has no legal meaning per the FDA, which is why cosmetic companies feel free to use it; they are not saying you won't be allergic to this or that any FDA approved testing has been done. Yet people think it means something so they buy hypoallergenic products.
As one marketeer put it during a presentation - "My job is great - I sell a product that is 90% air and people pay a premium for it!!"
5 hours? Hardly. USB puts out 5volts at 500mah. Step that down and do the math. 1.5 volts at around roughly 1500+mah? Hour maybe max charging time for the weaker model
.5 maH can take 4 plus hours to charge a cell.
According to the article and the manufacturers specs, it takes 5 hours to fully charge a flat cell; that's not an unrealistic number given a regular charger that puts out
Let's see - 5 hours to charge so you either leave a laptop on and run it's battery dead - wait - that little 3 prong hole in the wall - AC power - I can plug my laptop in there save its battery or I can plug in a real battery charger and fast charge my much cheaper, higher capacity AA/AAA's.
A battery charger is small, small, lightweight and can be has with dual voltage. Mine is 6 years old and weighs a few ounces - including cord and EU adapter.
If you really don't want to carry a charger you can buy a dozen high capacity rechargable AA's at the price of these - and simply carry them with you. (If you really would use that many you probably would carry a charger anyway).
This is an expensive answer to a question no one is asking.
Slashdot - we now spam the globe for you...
College should be about learning, not socializing, binge drinking, wanton promiscuity, or what have you.
All of that is part of learning, especially the socializing. The idea that the only learning comes from sitting in a classroom while a professor talks is ridiculous. Some of my most interesting discussions were around a white board in the pub while we drank and played foosball; and argued economics. In addition, the network you connect with will be available for life.
Somewhere along the way, it became accepted that every single person had to graduate from college to be successful and it became an extension of high school. Then all the immature and ignorant kids left their uptight parents' house, and lacking anything better to do (15 hours of class is a full load?) turned it into Animal House.
The problem is that other types of learning - such as apprenticeships and trade schools, have been discounted as somehow less valuable. Some of it is the pace of technological advancement - you used to be able to take a high school dropout that was good with mechanical things and turn them into a decent mechanic; today they need to understand computers, electronics and much more; so the bar has been raised there as well.
That along the idea of bullshit "core courses" being required for me to get a "well rounded" education is precisely why I don't have a college degree. I'm getting along fine without it and refuse to put up with 4 years of High School Part 2 just to get to graduate school. Books don't get any less informative just because they're not being regurgitated onto a chalkboard for you.
Part of a well rounded education is to produce citizens who understand the world around them and can think for themsleves. When I interview someone I ask questions that are designed to see if I would want to sit next to this person for 6 hours on a plane - if the answer is no I don't care how good their technical skills are they get a thumbs down. Harsh? Maybe, but that's life.
Many IV league schools no longer accept AP credits. They want you to get an education from THEIR institution. If you enroll into a school with 72 credits, about half of your university education doesn't even come from the university you attended. This is why many schools are following the examples of the IV league institutions.
While that may be their argument, I doubt few people enroll with enough credits to make much of a difference. If they did allow people to skip say a year, that would however have a significant financial impact as students matriculate early and they lose 1/4 of the expected tuition.
scratched? I have a collection of records dating from my high school years (pre - cd) and the biggest problem with vinyl is durability. The act of playing wears them, not to mention the scratches and other damage that often occurs. Ripping a pristine copy played on a high quality turntable with a top notch needle would eliminate much of the wear problem.
Still, there's something to be said for putting a record on a turntable, turn it by hand to get to the start of the song and then back off just enough so you can accurately time the start when broadcasting.
However, you shouldn't be talking shit, especially about a subject you know little about.
/. Thanks for clarifying.
And here I thought that was the whole point of
As far as I know, Google have never had a problem with de-listing any site that didn't want their content searching/caching (and I seem to remember back in the early days before search really took off, a lot of sites requested the spider didn't crawl them as it could kill their bandwidth pretty quickly).
Copyright owners do of course have the right to ask that their content not be listed (and failure to use a robots.txt shouldn't imply they're giving up that right), but I'd like to know if these sites just asked Google to delist them or if they immediately went running to the courts.
It's sounds like the issue was caching sites, not the merely listing them; but my ability to comprehend Dutch is limited and so I had a hard time reading the article.
I'm guessing Google nuked them to avoid paying the penalties while they sort this out; personally I think the Google cache will eventually disappear because of copyright issues. Personally I like it because it keeps alive some very old stuff I had written and published; and so provides a sort of history of the web service like the old way back machine.
If you do give people your content, then accept that it's going to be used like everything else published on the web.
That's the crux of the problem - the web has changed how easy it is to violate copyrights; and now the copyright holders are fighting back since there is potentially serious money involved.
I'm sure they don't consider themselves to give anyone anything other than the ability to view content as they serve it up via browser - Google's caching changes that and involves using their material.
It's like some sites that fought framing of websites - a site takes your content and builds a new page from it; generally to add in ads. The bottom line is sites still have rights to their content and copyright holders have the right to control its use. Far too many people seem to think simply because something is on the web it is free to use; I've had to educate programmers when they grab a picture or two and incorporate them in our content - I need to know where they got it and who is the copyright holder and make sure we have permission to use it.
Of course they have a right to exert control over it. But as a standard, most places would like their content indexed (how much work would it take to have an opt-in for every subdirectory on a site where content may belong to different authors?).
If they don't, as has happened, they stated "We do not want Google to index our pages without paying us lots of money, as google make money off the indexing and finding", and Google promptly took them out of the News and Search.
Now, they have exactly what they asked for. Google will make nothing from them.
The issue, as it appears (I have a hard time reading Dutch, is not indexing but caching - i.e. republishing the papers material.
Sure Google is uping the ante, but as a long term strategy it is unsustainable. Google can't shut off everyone that complains because it means they become increasingly irrelevant.
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
The point is that copyright owners still have a right to exert control over their copyrights; whether or not they use a robots.txt file. Searching and displaying results is different from caching and offering up the content independent of the original site - in the former Google is not redistributing the material but acting like a research librarian - something the site may want; but once the stuff is pulled then Google can't offer it up unless they have permission.
As you said - they are their to be visited, which is what a search supports.
This could be the tip of teh iceberg - given the increased desire to make money off of web content; which means limiting free access through such things as Google cache.
You left out Leopold and his most famous icon, Wagon-Lits
I sometimes wonder about the average
Maybe because they are too busy grasping something else?
I know it may sound odd but just to get access to the list of software that is "approved" is a lesson in bureaucratic absurdity; forget actually submitting something to get "approved".
Having gone through the approval process (DoD but not NMCI) to have several programs my company created I feel your pain. Conflicting requirements, forms that even the approving authority weren't sure how to fill out, changing program managers mid stream so you had to renegotiate any exceptions previously agreed upon were only some of the roadblocks. The biggest one is anyone in the chain can insist that the software must meet some requirement they deem important and stall the process.
My boss, who has zero DoD experience, sis not believe me when I said the process will take years (it did) because she was used to a corporate environment where a VP could say do this and it would get done - most people don't realize a mid level grunt has more power in the DoD than in the corporate world; if only because if something goes wrong they'll pull out the memo where they said "this won't work" and it's the boss, not them, on the hot seat.
The good thing is the PM's I worked with truly believed in making sure the grunt in the field got a good product that would do what they needed.
Do you now understand why we are discussing here what we are discussing?
Yes, and clearly you don't.
They are an orginisation attempting to make money with content including copyrighted material, which the copyright holders are legally entitled to recompense. But their business model is more like the modern day equivalent of a tv station, so they should be paying in a similar way to how tv stations pay for their use of copyrighted material.
I think you've confused marketeers with economists. Economists (at least the smart ones) ask a fundemnetal question:
This activity occurs at the expense of what?
Evert transaction occurs at the expense of another - if I buy a sweater then I don't buy a TV. You can't just look at any one action but need to look at the impact of that action.
Politicians and marketeers trumpet job creation - those pork barrel projects - they create jobs and pump taxes back into the economy (which I will use to buy more votes) - forget what the original taxpayer might have done with the nmoney had we not taken it in taxes; spent some percent running the government (a deadweight load of sorts) and actually put less back in then we took out.
If Vista makes companies more productive then they can create more jobs - if not then teh net effect is zero (or less because of switching costs)
They are an orginisation attempting to make money with content including copyrighted material, which the copyright holders are legally entitled to recompense. But their business model is more like the modern day equivalent of a tv station, so they should be paying in a similar way to how tv stations pay for their use of copyrighted material.,/I>
Except a TV sation uses material whose creators have cleared teh copyrights and have the right to use the material. They pay the owners, not the TV station. In this case, I doubt if the creators of the stuff YouTube hosts have cleared teh copyrights, and since YouTube probably has more cash than their users the studio will go after them - it's easier and cheaper to sue one thing with a stack of cash and collect than thosuands with very little.
The social networking sites had to see this coming - they're trying to make money off of other's material and didn't expect to hear form a lwyer? The arguement that they are simply hosting the materila and not infringing is like the person selling bootlegs made by others claiming they're innoncent because all they are doing is passing out DVD's.
They are mor elike a bar that has music (live or recoreded) - they can pay a license fee for the material they host; based on audience size. That of course means that they either need to make money off of advertising or start charging users. If they can do that profitably, great; if not then they had a bad business model in which case it sucks to be them.
This is an example of the very rare Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress case that can actually win.
Depends on the jury, but this guy is absolutely liable.
Not for libel (I don't even know why people would suggest that).
I'd say IANAL, but I am.
Since he posted pictures; would he not also be open to a copyright claim? That would probably be more clear cut than one based on reposting an email. While the liability may be small, fighting several hundred cases could get expensive and be more damaging than the actual damages; especially if they are filed in different locations.
Just curious.
People have been building communities around games for quite some time - from play by mail games to play in real life (such as chess and bridge) to role playing (such as Chainmail and D&D); all without computers. They had factions, newsletters, magazines, romances, leaders, etc. - which mirrored "real life." Not that that was restricted to games - look at any hobby and you'll see similar social constructs. All that the computer did was expand the ease of reach - no more waiting for mail or conventions to "see' old friends.
It's somewhat amusing to think that computers and the internet somehow is creating new "stuff" that has never been before seen; when often all it does is increase accessibility.
An iPod and a PSP? Why not just the PSP? It plays music too, Sure it can't hold your entire library but does it need to?
A couple of reasons:
The iPod is smaller and easier to use if all I want is music.
I like to listen to a variety of music and don't want to buy a 4 gig card just yet; so the iPod's capacity is nice. If 1 gig wad enough I'd just use my Treo.
Once you start putting videos on the ipod and running movies on it, I think you'll quickly find that you lose that 8 hour battery life. If you have the harddrive spinning, and the screen on for the whole time, plus the processor working harder, because there's just so much more data to decode, then you're probably looking at a 2 hour battery life. Which still isn't bad, you could watch 1 movie, but probably not what a lot of people want. You could save on battery power by storing the movies on memory cards, and reading off there, but I suspect the screen would probably be too much of a drain to give the type of experience people expect from iPods.
I agree memory cards are better - I regularly get 6 plus hours off of my PSP with movies on MS; with flash so cheap you could put in the HD and 1 or 2 gigs of cache and just fetch and store the desired movie and shutdown the HD. A higher capacity battery would help as well; as would a removable one for those really long flights or trips.
Either way, a small portable movie viewer is what I see as the next big thing - especially with decent battery life and instant on]off/resume; video out would be nice as well. All around $250, BTW.
This is the SONY walkman all over again, then the SONY CD walkman... it's done. It's hard to imagine quantum leaps of coolness and convenience beyond an iPod or video iPod. The curve had to level, there just isn't any there there. Apple should be happy with what they've done, but I don't think this is a growth niche any longer.
I'd say an iPod with a PSP sized screen would be a hit, especially if it could play various standard video formats. I'd add a small SD slot as well to allow people to buy or rent movies on a card. With an 8 hour plus battery life I think it would be a hit with travelers. Right now I carry a PSP and my iPod, I'd love one device the size of an iPod with a PSP sized screen. Put the scroll wheel on the back (so you don't need an expensive touch screen) or via small buttons on the side and you'd have most of the case space devoted to the screen. My bet is Sony does it before Apple, though. There new mini portable is close, except that it has a non-replaceable battery, short life and is about $600 too expensive.