Why not take this further. Shoot up rockets with big sails attached for the sole purpose of collecting space debris. put them in an orbit then deploy their sails or parachutes so they will catch a swath of debris. if the rocket is traveling slightly faster than the debris the sail wont be punctured and it will fill up before losing its velocity and then falling out of orbit.
The machine I used for the National election was pretty sweet... it used a dial selector like a classic iPod and your selection was highlighted as you scrolled through the options. There was a big green button to confirm your choice and then a screen after that displayed your choice and instruction to confirm again.
It was pretty idiot proof IMHO. Oh you also get a paper receipt.
This is an interesting observation. Why assume that a long term strategy is for a short term gain? Getting sex is definitely a short term gain, whereas ensuring healthy offspring is definitely long term. Do we even know if Chimps have a sex drive outside of procreation (as in Bonobo style enjoyment for it's own sake)? If the Chimps are waiting to have sex until the female is in oestrus it doesn't sound like it's related to enjoyment of the moment...
There are a variety of DRMd eBook formats they could choose to use. This would satisfy their contractual obligations if nothing else.
Why they haven't changed to that is a mystery... they should have done so and added something new and put out a release.. would have been relatively bland PR instead of this negative result.
How is google doing this? I use google news regularly to view headlines and summaries... If I click on a link it goes to the source, not some google branded/ad supported page with the content.
What websites are we talking about who are just scraping the content and putting it on their site? That is a clear violation of copyright and should not be tolerated... but aggregators are not doing that... Google does go a step further to show their own summary (first paragraph or something) but that is hardly 'the content' and if it is then it's not much of a story to be complaining about.
How much of the expense is in infrastructure costs and how much in administrative costs?
The government should retain the bill for the infrastructure costs (digging ditches, laying conduit, etc) and pass along the administrative costs to a buyer (long term hardware costs, staffing, maintenance, etc)
A large portion of the expense upfront is going to be infrastructure. This is the stuff that has to happen for any kind of access to new bandwidth. The gov can at their discretion impose a licensing fee for access to the infrastructure to help offset the costs which can be variable based on the current economic climate - and can provide hard maintenance costs (repairing of conduits, unforeseen environmental damage, etc) though likely through a sub-contractor - possibly the managing company themselves as a pre-negotiated rate.
I think with some financial model expertise applied to this scenario they can come up with a plan for how a private company can purchase or lease the rights to manage and profit from managing such a network. It's likely to be a combination of the above responsibilities - ideally it would be split based on what public services are good at and what private services are good at (big heavy projects for the gov/public - small agile projects for the private sector) and could possibly be leased out to multiple companies (IT goes to one, Customer Service goes to another, Network Engineering to another, Administration and Accounting to another). This would not be unlike a fully private company which would do the same via sub-contracting.
So if I were to set up a website that let people put rss feeds of their choice on a portal page - and then added advertising of my own to that same page - and the user decided to choose one of these:
What if I then created a link that said "Get all the Associated Press RSS feeds" which then did the copy/paste for the user and created a page for them of all the above feeds?
Then based on user activity I found that every user (99.5%) was clicking that auto-AP button... so to provide good customer service I just added tabs to my interface with one of them being "AP News" by default.
All this while, the pages only show the Title, summary, attribution, date and a link to the original article.
So then I get sued... right?
What if I just made "widgets" that people could download to their Widget product of choice? How about a desktop application that does the same thing - ad free - but has a purchase price attached?
Any thoughts?
My current Mail program allows me to consume RSS feeds, as do a variety of widgets (online and off) and none of them are non-commercial and I'm fairly certain that none of them are paying the AP any license fee.
How about just publishing to Wikipedia? Seems like a place that a patent examiner might look when investigating prior art. Especially if someone also publishes an article on how Wikipedia is being used to publish "public domain" prior art and then adds a reference to examples which could turn into a big list of inventions...
If your patent uses a basic concept add a cross link to that article as well so that it's more likely to show up in a search on said concept and of course cross link to prior art to your own invention as well.
Personally that's too pricey for me. 365 days a year x 2 hours a day = $730 / year. Yes Cable TV is about $600 / year and you get (as long as it's on standard Cable) all you can eat.
I know, I start typing "Dam..." into the search box and "Damages" shows right up, it's the worst... I wanted to get a random TV show, not exactly what I was looking for.
If it's on Facebook, it's sharing... not distributing.
An interesting potential point of view, and possibly within fair use rights? These aren't strangers you're giving out links to... they're friends. It's no different than emailing a link to a file to someone you know, or writing it down on a napkin at a coffee shop... it's sharing, not distribution.
Now with Facebook, RIAA would have to tackle the fair use scenario of friends sharing with friends. It could be a whole different story.
As in it was a work of art - not a commercial for toys.
I thought it was perfect. Everything about it was gritty and sublime. Super heroes, super problems. An alternate timeline where superheroes destroy the VC in vietnam and with as much ignorance and lack of humanity as was present in our own timeline? Then as a result Nixon is hailed and re-elected 3 times? Wonderful social commentary on what could have been.
Watchmen was about a real scenario where people have super-powers, all the ignorance and corruption and pettiness mixed up with noble intentions, fear driven obsessions and moral paranoia which would affect our society if this was the norm.
You want a story that matches up with this and is kid safe? Watch The Incredibles. It has a similar timeline but leaves out all the confusing parts. Want something more adult but still sanitized.. watch that Will Smith movie (at least he's a drunk).
The Watchmen did very well in it's opening weekend when all the fans went out to see it. No it did not appeal to the masses... did it have to? There are a lot of films that don't convert into blockbusters but are considered to be incredible works that stand on their own merit (rather than how much money they bring in).
Pop culture can have it's heroes, just let those of us who aren't afraid to experience a different reality have a few of our own.
Sounds like they just want to take their ball home since they don't get to be the star player (or even get their way).
SO be it. Give them what they want. Take down all music related content everywhere that isn't on their own sites. That means: Discussion boards about their music, Fan sites about their music, album reviews, links to amazon, etc. All of it.
Boycott these people up the wazoo... and just to make it fun... pick on someone specific to make and example of them.
Start by removing their Wikipedia page then systematically begin contacting websites which are highly ranked in Google for their name... ask them to participate in protest.
It doesn't have to be permanent (though the 301 responses need to be;-p ) - just long enough to make the point.
"Hey [music writer who is famous], what happened to all your google hits? i can't find anything about you anywhere... it's like you don't exist except on your 'official' site. Aren't you supposed to be famous.
Keep it up long enough and maybe they'll even see an economic impact.
This advice makes sense in a down economy but you have to remind yourself how boring that sounds. Learn it once and do the same thing for the rest of your life? Why not just skip a degree, go to work flipping burgers, save all your money and buy a franchise like a SubWay or a Gas Station... you'll still make 100k a year and never have to learn anything new.
1) Be a Quality Assurance Engineer - ie: Bug Squasher
2) Be a whiz at using a variety of source control systems (CVS, SVN, SourceSafe, BitKeeper)
3) Learn how to write great documentation
These 3 skills will make you stand out amongst the crowd of new graduates.
You won't get to be a lead developer you're first time out (rarely) so plan on being a support developer (#1), the kind who cleans up and tests the code the more senior people write. To do this you'll need to know (#2) and to stand out within that group of employees you can use (#3).
Then when it's time for a review you will have proven that you are a good team member, you can write good clean code and that you fully understand the code that you've written.
An employer can't ask for anything more and you should get promoted to a junior developer position.
50 competing for 5 is a LOT better.... what happens when one of the 5 don't work out? What's the odds you'll get called back when it's now 4500 : 1 as opposed to 45 : 1
Being a fish in a small pond is always better for job security, even if you're a small fish.
The biggest problem with going after a niche job description is that you're almost required to relocate.
Religion and Science have nothing to do with one another.. one can't be the antithesis of the other.
That's like saying Math is the antithesis of Guessing. Sure you use Math when you don't want to just guess the answer but Guessing is used in many contexts other than Math... and Math isn't used for instance to discern someone's mood at the moment, while Guessing is.
Likewise Religion has attempted to provide answers to questions which are more effectively answered with Science but not all of the questions Religion attempts to answer are in the realm of Science - such as "Is there an afterlife" - Science doesn't care and shouldn't care.. but Religion does (as does philosophy). Likewise Science is not in the domain of answering questions about morality or ethics - while Religion is.
"Broadcast TV" - I'd really rather see an explosion in the use of Broadcast digital TV and Music. I'm hoping that the cable only networks decide to drop the 'only' bit and put their shows OTA... it's all ad supported now anyways and there are a lot of open channels available on DTV broadcast bandwidth. They can even deliver superior quality if they want. The HD I get for CBS is superb... OTOH I do already pay for internet service regardless... so if they can do ad supported online with very high quality I'd take that option as well. Anything to get rid of the Cable/Satellite pay through the nose monthly for the same dreck 90% of the time and new episodes you don't find out about until they've already aired (cause you didn't even know the show existed - too many channels).
It's getting there, slowly... and only on the most modern browsers... and Flash isn't standing still (see Pixel Bender applied to live webcams for an example).
The biggest issue is the "modern browser" problem... Flash will work in IE6/7/8 FF1/2/3 etc... with a relatively minor update to the plugin (doesn't affect anything else).
Flash is now more searchable via Google as well and has support for deep linking.... not to mention the old standby SOCKET support which still requires a lot of extra development to get working in html + AJAX + Comet server while in Flash it's almost trivial to set up (though the use case for it is hard to come by of course).
Indus River: Funeral Party is sending a loved one down the river amongst all the other lost loved ones on floating funeral barges, dressed in their finest apparel... suddenly they all stand up on their barges and begin dancing to a groovy pop song with Indian guitar twangs...;-p
Pan Out to see everyone elated and cheerful to have their loved ones back, until all the zombies begin complaining about how they were not dressed well enough and that they are sure to come back as dung beetles because their sons/daughters have disgraced them so on their funeral day.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not take this further. Shoot up rockets with big sails attached for the sole purpose of collecting space debris. put them in an orbit then deploy their sails or parachutes so they will catch a swath of debris. if the rocket is traveling slightly faster than the debris the sail wont be punctured and it will fill up before losing its velocity and then falling out of orbit.
The machine I used for the National election was pretty sweet... it used a dial selector like a classic iPod and your selection was highlighted as you scrolled through the options. There was a big green button to confirm your choice and then a screen after that displayed your choice and instruction to confirm again.
It was pretty idiot proof IMHO. Oh you also get a paper receipt.
This is an interesting observation. Why assume that a long term strategy is for a short term gain? Getting sex is definitely a short term gain, whereas ensuring healthy offspring is definitely long term. Do we even know if Chimps have a sex drive outside of procreation (as in Bonobo style enjoyment for it's own sake)? If the Chimps are waiting to have sex until the female is in oestrus it doesn't sound like it's related to enjoyment of the moment...
There are a variety of DRMd eBook formats they could choose to use. This would satisfy their contractual obligations if nothing else.
Why they haven't changed to that is a mystery... they should have done so and added something new and put out a release.. would have been relatively bland PR instead of this negative result.
How is google doing this? I use google news regularly to view headlines and summaries... If I click on a link it goes to the source, not some google branded/ad supported page with the content.
What websites are we talking about who are just scraping the content and putting it on their site? That is a clear violation of copyright and should not be tolerated... but aggregators are not doing that... Google does go a step further to show their own summary (first paragraph or something) but that is hardly 'the content' and if it is then it's not much of a story to be complaining about.
How much of the expense is in infrastructure costs and how much in administrative costs?
The government should retain the bill for the infrastructure costs (digging ditches, laying conduit, etc) and pass along the administrative costs to a buyer (long term hardware costs, staffing, maintenance, etc)
A large portion of the expense upfront is going to be infrastructure. This is the stuff that has to happen for any kind of access to new bandwidth. The gov can at their discretion impose a licensing fee for access to the infrastructure to help offset the costs which can be variable based on the current economic climate - and can provide hard maintenance costs (repairing of conduits, unforeseen environmental damage, etc) though likely through a sub-contractor - possibly the managing company themselves as a pre-negotiated rate.
I think with some financial model expertise applied to this scenario they can come up with a plan for how a private company can purchase or lease the rights to manage and profit from managing such a network. It's likely to be a combination of the above responsibilities - ideally it would be split based on what public services are good at and what private services are good at (big heavy projects for the gov/public - small agile projects for the private sector) and could possibly be leased out to multiple companies (IT goes to one, Customer Service goes to another, Network Engineering to another, Administration and Accounting to another). This would not be unlike a fully private company which would do the same via sub-contracting.
So if I were to set up a website that let people put rss feeds of their choice on a portal page - and then added advertising of my own to that same page - and the user decided to choose one of these:
RSS Feeds
I'd be open to a lawsuit?
What if I then created a link that said "Get all the Associated Press RSS feeds" which then did the copy/paste for the user and created a page for them of all the above feeds?
Then based on user activity I found that every user (99.5%) was clicking that auto-AP button... so to provide good customer service I just added tabs to my interface with one of them being "AP News" by default.
All this while, the pages only show the Title, summary, attribution, date and a link to the original article.
So then I get sued... right?
What if I just made "widgets" that people could download to their Widget product of choice? How about a desktop application that does the same thing - ad free - but has a purchase price attached?
Any thoughts?
My current Mail program allows me to consume RSS feeds, as do a variety of widgets (online and off) and none of them are non-commercial and I'm fairly certain that none of them are paying the AP any license fee.
You've just described a new industry: SEP - Search Engine Patenting...
How about just publishing to Wikipedia? Seems like a place that a patent examiner might look when investigating prior art. Especially if someone also publishes an article on how Wikipedia is being used to publish "public domain" prior art and then adds a reference to examples which could turn into a big list of inventions...
If your patent uses a basic concept add a cross link to that article as well so that it's more likely to show up in a search on said concept and of course cross link to prior art to your own invention as well.
iTunes does this now... it's $0.99 a show. Enjoy.
Personally that's too pricey for me. 365 days a year x 2 hours a day = $730 / year. Yes Cable TV is about $600 / year and you get (as long as it's on standard Cable) all you can eat.
I know, I start typing "Dam..." into the search box and "Damages" shows right up, it's the worst... I wanted to get a random TV show, not exactly what I was looking for.
If it's on Facebook, it's sharing... not distributing.
An interesting potential point of view, and possibly within fair use rights? These aren't strangers you're giving out links to... they're friends. It's no different than emailing a link to a file to someone you know, or writing it down on a napkin at a coffee shop... it's sharing, not distribution.
Now with Facebook, RIAA would have to tackle the fair use scenario of friends sharing with friends. It could be a whole different story.
As in it was a work of art - not a commercial for toys.
I thought it was perfect. Everything about it was gritty and sublime. Super heroes, super problems. An alternate timeline where superheroes destroy the VC in vietnam and with as much ignorance and lack of humanity as was present in our own timeline? Then as a result Nixon is hailed and re-elected 3 times? Wonderful social commentary on what could have been.
Watchmen was about a real scenario where people have super-powers, all the ignorance and corruption and pettiness mixed up with noble intentions, fear driven obsessions and moral paranoia which would affect our society if this was the norm.
You want a story that matches up with this and is kid safe? Watch The Incredibles. It has a similar timeline but leaves out all the confusing parts. Want something more adult but still sanitized.. watch that Will Smith movie (at least he's a drunk).
The Watchmen did very well in it's opening weekend when all the fans went out to see it. No it did not appeal to the masses... did it have to? There are a lot of films that don't convert into blockbusters but are considered to be incredible works that stand on their own merit (rather than how much money they bring in).
Pop culture can have it's heroes, just let those of us who aren't afraid to experience a different reality have a few of our own.
Sounds like they just want to take their ball home since they don't get to be the star player (or even get their way).
SO be it. Give them what they want. Take down all music related content everywhere that isn't on their own sites. That means: Discussion boards about their music, Fan sites about their music, album reviews, links to amazon, etc. All of it.
Boycott these people up the wazoo... and just to make it fun... pick on someone specific to make and example of them.
Start by removing their Wikipedia page then systematically begin contacting websites which are highly ranked in Google for their name... ask them to participate in protest.
It doesn't have to be permanent (though the 301 responses need to be ;-p ) - just long enough to make the point.
"Hey [music writer who is famous], what happened to all your google hits? i can't find anything about you anywhere... it's like you don't exist except on your 'official' site. Aren't you supposed to be famous.
Keep it up long enough and maybe they'll even see an economic impact.
This advice makes sense in a down economy but you have to remind yourself how boring that sounds. Learn it once and do the same thing for the rest of your life? Why not just skip a degree, go to work flipping burgers, save all your money and buy a franchise like a SubWay or a Gas Station... you'll still make 100k a year and never have to learn anything new.
Learn how to:
1) Be a Quality Assurance Engineer - ie: Bug Squasher
2) Be a whiz at using a variety of source control systems (CVS, SVN, SourceSafe, BitKeeper)
3) Learn how to write great documentation
These 3 skills will make you stand out amongst the crowd of new graduates.
You won't get to be a lead developer you're first time out (rarely) so plan on being a support developer (#1), the kind who cleans up and tests the code the more senior people write. To do this you'll need to know (#2) and to stand out within that group of employees you can use (#3).
Then when it's time for a review you will have proven that you are a good team member, you can write good clean code and that you fully understand the code that you've written.
An employer can't ask for anything more and you should get promoted to a junior developer position.
50 competing for 5 is a LOT better.... what happens when one of the 5 don't work out? What's the odds you'll get called back when it's now 4500 : 1 as opposed to 45 : 1
Being a fish in a small pond is always better for job security, even if you're a small fish.
The biggest problem with going after a niche job description is that you're almost required to relocate.
Religion and Science have nothing to do with one another.. one can't be the antithesis of the other.
That's like saying Math is the antithesis of Guessing. Sure you use Math when you don't want to just guess the answer but Guessing is used in many contexts other than Math... and Math isn't used for instance to discern someone's mood at the moment, while Guessing is.
Likewise Religion has attempted to provide answers to questions which are more effectively answered with Science but not all of the questions Religion attempts to answer are in the realm of Science - such as "Is there an afterlife" - Science doesn't care and shouldn't care.. but Religion does (as does philosophy). Likewise Science is not in the domain of answering questions about morality or ethics - while Religion is.
You are giving Creationism too much credit.
"defending the defendant's Due Process defense"
This sentence construction is indefensible!
"Broadcast TV" - I'd really rather see an explosion in the use of Broadcast digital TV and Music. I'm hoping that the cable only networks decide to drop the 'only' bit and put their shows OTA... it's all ad supported now anyways and there are a lot of open channels available on DTV broadcast bandwidth. They can even deliver superior quality if they want. The HD I get for CBS is superb... OTOH I do already pay for internet service regardless... so if they can do ad supported online with very high quality I'd take that option as well. Anything to get rid of the Cable/Satellite pay through the nose monthly for the same dreck 90% of the time and new episodes you don't find out about until they've already aired (cause you didn't even know the show existed - too many channels).
Flash related content obsolete
It's getting there, slowly... and only on the most modern browsers... and Flash isn't standing still (see Pixel Bender applied to live webcams for an example).
The biggest issue is the "modern browser" problem... Flash will work in IE6/7/8 FF1/2/3 etc... with a relatively minor update to the plugin (doesn't affect anything else).
Flash is now more searchable via Google as well and has support for deep linking.... not to mention the old standby SOCKET support which still requires a lot of extra development to get working in html + AJAX + Comet server while in Flash it's almost trivial to set up (though the use case for it is hard to come by of course).
Here's the opening sequence....
Indus River: Funeral Party is sending a loved one down the river amongst all the other lost loved ones on floating funeral barges, dressed in their finest apparel... suddenly they all stand up on their barges and begin dancing to a groovy pop song with Indian guitar twangs... ;-p
Pan Out to see everyone elated and cheerful to have their loved ones back, until all the zombies begin complaining about how they were not dressed well enough and that they are sure to come back as dung beetles because their sons/daughters have disgraced them so on their funeral day.
Are you on the screen play team for the next Resident Evil direct to DVD movie?
Lister: Rimmer, ALIENS used our bog roll?
So funny, i read that as "blog roll" - "ALIENS used our blog roll!" hehehehe - too much pop culture for me...