I think the genius part of this idea is that every time a consumer send a Pepsi to a friend, Pepsi captures that mobile phone number and can then send their own marketing alerts to that person.
It's a great idea for Pepsi, but outside of the novelty of sending a Pepsi to someone by SMS, I don't really see this becoming very popular. Maybe in Middle Schools?
By virtue of the fact that we can recall the tool, means that it still has some cultural relevance. Any tool named on this list is an argument for the tool still "living". The examples we should be citing are tools used in 79 A.D. of which there are no records, and no remembrance of. Those tools have truly "died" but we will never know what they are.
That was my first instinct. It seems like it's pretty easy to trip the eFUSE, how hard would it be to write a virus, wrapped up in a free app that tripped it? Seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
I've encountered a lot of malware and more than half of it exists solely to exploit bad design just like this.
I don't ever mod my phones, but I wouldn't buy a Droid X for fear of having someone brick it for me.
The issue is that with an actual in person conversation, there is no ongoing record of that conversation and the content of that conversation are heresay. It's one person's word against the other, and without a tape recorder, no way to know what was actually said. With the various forms of new communication (of which I'll even include The Web), there are varying degrees of permanence. I can post a bad share price to my website for 15 minutes, and then correct the error, if someone buys a share of my company based on that price, I am obligated to honor that. However, without proper record keeping, how can either party prove what was on the site when the purchase was made. As such, there are regulations in place that specify that Web content must be discoverable, so that those answers can be determined. It's complex, but not overly complex, because I own the servers on which the information gets published. I simply save a copy of every version of a file, every time it's published and save a state of the database. Presto magic.
Things start to get really complicated when I no longer own the infrastructure. If I post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slashdot, or wherever and misquote a shareprice, then that information is controlled by somebody else. It's still considered public communication by the legal and regulatory entities, but I can't reproduce it. I can't even be sure that it's retained and could be reproduced by the site on which I left the remark. This is no different than the environment that has existed since the days of BBC forums and the comment sections of blogs. The issue now, is that the form of communication now has a name: Social Media. As such, many of these issues are actually making their way to the individuals who manage risk at these heavily regulated industries and the questions are being asked.
I don't deny that the regulations are outdated and were written for a time when the printed page was the primary method of communication, but in the space between the current rules and the new ones, there is a tremendous risk for those organizations who have to comply and a huge opportunity for an industry of service providers to step in and put their minds at ease.
The same debate raged when email hit the scene. Seems silly now, but that's just the way things go.
It's also really frustrating that Cuil does not provide language options. When searching for people on Cuil, I tend to get a lot of foreign websites that I can't understand. It would be nice to be able to specify "English Only" websites, if that's what I was after. The only options Cuil has is Safe Search and Typing Suggestions.
I have to say that the best of Coulton's songs has to be First of May. I first heard Ikea and was interested. Once I heard First of May, I was sold. That is by far the best song in his catalog:
"...bring your favorite lady, or at least your favorite lay."
For the uninitiated: Mp3 and more information here.
The other way is to pass the cost on to the consumer.
I mean, think of internet bandwidth like you would electricity or water (other public utilities). No providers offer unlimited quantities of either, you pay for the amount you use, you pay for each kilowatt hour of electricity you use and each gallon of water or whatever it is that they measure.
Why should interent access be any different? If everyone left their faucets on all day, every day, there would be a water shortage and nobody would have as much water as they wanted. During the summer, the power company tells you to be energy conscious so there aren't brown outs. If everyone is streaming HDTV over IP and making VoIP phone calls all day long, it's going to slow things down, but if the bandwidth usages were passed on to the consumers, it would be in the best interest of the providers to deliver that content as fast as possible.
If network A delivers content twice as fast as network B, they can get twice as much money out of their clients-per hour (Assuming the government regulates fair-market prices so there isn't price-gouging).
I'm not saying I am particularly fond of the idea of paying per megabyte downloaded or uploaded, but it seems that if you are looking to make it a public utility, you have to, otherwise, people are going to take advantage.
I agree, For serious portable gaming, the PSP rocks. It suffers from a lack of attention by game developers, but the GTAs, Loco Roco, Syphon Filter, and MGS: Portable Ops are all great games, and this year it looks like there will be a ton of developers jumping on the bandwagon, with Final Fantasy, Crush, Castlevainia, and the PS1 back catalogue.
It's true that a lot of people watch videos and play music on it. I keep several hours of the most recent Adult Swim shows on my memory card, just in case I find myself in the mood for vegging out during my morning commute. It's just so easy to get TiVo shows and windows Media Center shows on to your PSP, that why wouldn't you?
That being said, I would never have bought it for the media features. The power of the console is way ahead of the DS, Nintendo just has the benefit of being in the handheld market for a solid decade ahead of Sony. But given the option between a WII and a PSP (about the same price point), I'd take the PSP any day.
Personally,
I think the real game to watch out for is Whack-a-mole. Do you know that the object of that game is to kill as many moles as possible in a single minute. I've seen death rates in the hundreds-per-minute category. I'm no statistician, but by this kind of formula, I'd have to say that Whack-a-mole is at least 257.2% violent. I've also seen the affect it has on the children who play it. How many time have you returned home after a long day at the office to see your children slaughtering moles in the front yard by the thousands? The ghost eating is bad enough, but what about the poor moles?
I'd much prefer that they play games in which they kill realistic looking mothers and children at the park half-a-dozen-per-minute than see them perform animatronic-rodent genocide.
There are already a bunch of other companies that are doing this.
I signed up for Starz movie download service called Vongo. The movie quality is pretty decent and you can start watching it while you download. You get to keep the movie for as long as Starz has the rights to it, plus you can put it on any Plays for Sure video player, so you can watch it at home and on the road. Plus, they offer a flat $10/month subscription. All the movies you want for $10. Flat fee subscriptions are where it's at. I watch movies I'd never pay for on their own, some of them I end up liking, some I don't, but if anything it exposes me to more of the crap the studios are churning out. I've passed on other services with better catalogs, only because I like the flat fee.
There are some other options with better catalogs that charge about $4 per download and let you keep them for 30 days. I'm not sure what their portable support is. But Apple's folly is that they are offering it through iTunes, which is solely for your iPod. How much video do people actually watch on their iPods anyway. It would be more successful to cater to the media center PC crowd.
I'm all about getting my programing on the intarwebs. I just don't want some crappy Apple DRM all over my movies. I want to pop some popcorn and watch a movie with booming surround sound and a big screen, not huddled over my iPod and not tethered to iTunes.
Why is nobody upset that this ad is sexist?
Why isn't it two men fighting? Is it more sexist because they ARE women? Is it empowering to women? Are PSPs just for women? Or is it just an ad that's being overthought with regard to one particularl aspect?
Granted. I don't think it's a great ad, but it's not like it's saying the White PSP is better and the Black PSP is inferior. And that by proxy all white things are better than all black things. Racism implies some sort of derogatory treatment or belief about an entire racial group. I don't see that here. Just because a person's skin color is awknowledged doesn't make the awknowledgement racist. Being black or being white is what a person is. It is not racist to awknowledge that fact.
The biggest myth about music piracy is that people were rejecting a legal option for an illegal one.
The reason Napster and the like were successful is because digital downloads were only available illegally. Filetrading was the only way to get a copy of that song you wanted right away.
People want digital music. They want to hear a song and get it. Once they can do that legally, the majority of people will choose the legal option over the illegal one, even though it's not free.
Now if we can just get rid of all the proprietary DRM that has become a bigger plague than any of the piracy, the world will truly be a better place.
Just recently I beat Pole Position.
For years I never thought the game had an ending, you jsut race around the track, blow up, and run out of time. "It's an infinite loop," I thought. But after putting in hour upon hour into the game, getting better lap times, and finally, not blowing up, I eventually got to the end of the game.
What a let down though, it gives you your score and then says "Game Over". There's no congratulations or nothing.
But now the end of Pitfall has been reached. How many other games out there did we think never had an ending until recently, when the impossible was proved possible?
Anyone ever beat ET?
Clearly this wasn't well thought out and may just be a hoax since the web address is still revolution.nintendo.com and wii.nintendo.com doesn't even resolve.
Isn't that like the first thing that people do with a new product? Get the domain set up?
I'm just wondering, but one issue that I've heard raised several times is that DRM prevents material from moving into the public domain and violates copyright law? Couldn't a consumer-driven DRM movement (not necessarily DReaM, but something Open Source) build into it's schema the ability to move material into the public domain once the copyright has expired. In this I mean, that this open source DRM would protect the owner's copyright, only so long as the copyright exists. After which, the DRM removes itself, turns itself off or something? I mean, if DRM is going to be accepted it not only needs to protect the owner of the copyright, but also provide something for the owner of the license. The two models that exist are all-or-nothing models. Apple and Sony have a DRM scheme that's anti-consumer. Unprotected mp3s are totally pro-user. Couldn't a consumer movement combine the issues of both camps into something ultimately fair?
If I were Google, which I'm not, I would give away the free wireless without any special patent because it's only going to help me. Why? Because Google ads are already all over the mother-loving internet. I don't need to create new ad space, it's already there, but what I can do is fine-grain my targeting so that instead of serving up an ad for a national mortgage broker, I can serve up the ad for the mortgage broker within 1 mile of the hotspot. It seems like a brilliant plan to me. You are reading an Email through Gmail that mentions Dentist, what is in the ad space? Dentists in your area. Even without creating new space the premium price that Google could charge for this would offset the cost of the WiFi. Sure, it assumes that those using the WiFi would be coming in contact with existing Google ads, but that's pretty much inevitable... and just for good measure, make the user sit through a 30-second rich media advertisement before they can roam free (like Salon's Day Pass). But that's just my 2-cents. Google doesn't even have to do anything like NetZero. They already have presence throughout the internet and once they can offer targeted ads by hotspot, they will have an advantage over overture and everybody else doing contextual advertising and once they've taken over the market they really will have a monopoly and then they can do whatever they want. But if Google doesn't already have this patent, I'm claiming the IP right now for the good of a competitive market.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the genius part of this idea is that every time a consumer send a Pepsi to a friend, Pepsi captures that mobile phone number and can then send their own marketing alerts to that person.
It's a great idea for Pepsi, but outside of the novelty of sending a Pepsi to someone by SMS, I don't really see this becoming very popular. Maybe in Middle Schools?
By virtue of the fact that we can recall the tool, means that it still has some cultural relevance. Any tool named on this list is an argument for the tool still "living". The examples we should be citing are tools used in 79 A.D. of which there are no records, and no remembrance of. Those tools have truly "died" but we will never know what they are.
That was my first instinct. It seems like it's pretty easy to trip the eFUSE, how hard would it be to write a virus, wrapped up in a free app that tripped it? Seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
I've encountered a lot of malware and more than half of it exists solely to exploit bad design just like this.
I don't ever mod my phones, but I wouldn't buy a Droid X for fear of having someone brick it for me.
Agreed.
The issue is that with an actual in person conversation, there is no ongoing record of that conversation and the content of that conversation are heresay. It's one person's word against the other, and without a tape recorder, no way to know what was actually said. With the various forms of new communication (of which I'll even include The Web), there are varying degrees of permanence. I can post a bad share price to my website for 15 minutes, and then correct the error, if someone buys a share of my company based on that price, I am obligated to honor that. However, without proper record keeping, how can either party prove what was on the site when the purchase was made. As such, there are regulations in place that specify that Web content must be discoverable, so that those answers can be determined. It's complex, but not overly complex, because I own the servers on which the information gets published. I simply save a copy of every version of a file, every time it's published and save a state of the database. Presto magic.
Things start to get really complicated when I no longer own the infrastructure. If I post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slashdot, or wherever and misquote a shareprice, then that information is controlled by somebody else. It's still considered public communication by the legal and regulatory entities, but I can't reproduce it. I can't even be sure that it's retained and could be reproduced by the site on which I left the remark. This is no different than the environment that has existed since the days of BBC forums and the comment sections of blogs. The issue now, is that the form of communication now has a name: Social Media. As such, many of these issues are actually making their way to the individuals who manage risk at these heavily regulated industries and the questions are being asked.
I don't deny that the regulations are outdated and were written for a time when the printed page was the primary method of communication, but in the space between the current rules and the new ones, there is a tremendous risk for those organizations who have to comply and a huge opportunity for an industry of service providers to step in and put their minds at ease.
The same debate raged when email hit the scene. Seems silly now, but that's just the way things go.
It's also really frustrating that Cuil does not provide language options. When searching for people on Cuil, I tend to get a lot of foreign websites that I can't understand. It would be nice to be able to specify "English Only" websites, if that's what I was after. The only options Cuil has is Safe Search and Typing Suggestions.
I have to say that the best of Coulton's songs has to be First of May. I first heard Ikea and was interested. Once I heard First of May, I was sold. That is by far the best song in his catalog:
"...bring your favorite lady, or at least your favorite lay."
For the uninitiated: Mp3 and more information here.
The other way is to pass the cost on to the consumer.
I mean, think of internet bandwidth like you would electricity or water (other public utilities). No providers offer unlimited quantities of either, you pay for the amount you use, you pay for each kilowatt hour of electricity you use and each gallon of water or whatever it is that they measure.
Why should interent access be any different? If everyone left their faucets on all day, every day, there would be a water shortage and nobody would have as much water as they wanted. During the summer, the power company tells you to be energy conscious so there aren't brown outs. If everyone is streaming HDTV over IP and making VoIP phone calls all day long, it's going to slow things down, but if the bandwidth usages were passed on to the consumers, it would be in the best interest of the providers to deliver that content as fast as possible.
If network A delivers content twice as fast as network B, they can get twice as much money out of their clients-per hour (Assuming the government regulates fair-market prices so there isn't price-gouging).
I'm not saying I am particularly fond of the idea of paying per megabyte downloaded or uploaded, but it seems that if you are looking to make it a public utility, you have to, otherwise, people are going to take advantage.
I've been looking to port some of my DVDs to a format my PSP can use. I've tried a few things, but with no success. How are you doing it?
I agree,
For serious portable gaming, the PSP rocks.
It suffers from a lack of attention by game developers, but the GTAs, Loco Roco, Syphon Filter, and MGS: Portable Ops are all great games, and this year it looks like there will be a ton of developers jumping on the bandwagon, with Final Fantasy, Crush, Castlevainia, and the PS1 back catalogue.
It's true that a lot of people watch videos and play music on it. I keep several hours of the most recent Adult Swim shows on my memory card, just in case I find myself in the mood for vegging out during my morning commute. It's just so easy to get TiVo shows and windows Media Center shows on to your PSP, that why wouldn't you?
That being said, I would never have bought it for the media features. The power of the console is way ahead of the DS, Nintendo just has the benefit of being in the handheld market for a solid decade ahead of Sony. But given the option between a WII and a PSP (about the same price point), I'd take the PSP any day.
How many people would love to have the domain sudo.su?
Seriously though,
Isn't 0.91 dead anyway?
Why not get on the 2.0 bandwagon?
Is there still value in 0.91?
Personally,
I think the real game to watch out for is Whack-a-mole. Do you know that the object of that game is to kill as many moles as possible in a single minute. I've seen death rates in the hundreds-per-minute category. I'm no statistician, but by this kind of formula, I'd have to say that Whack-a-mole is at least 257.2% violent. I've also seen the affect it has on the children who play it. How many time have you returned home after a long day at the office to see your children slaughtering moles in the front yard by the thousands? The ghost eating is bad enough, but what about the poor moles?
I'd much prefer that they play games in which they kill realistic looking mothers and children at the park half-a-dozen-per-minute than see them perform animatronic-rodent genocide.
It's not a big truck.
It's a series of tubes
And because of your Scrubs, my personal internet is taking days to arrive.
There are already a bunch of other companies that are doing this. I signed up for Starz movie download service called Vongo. The movie quality is pretty decent and you can start watching it while you download. You get to keep the movie for as long as Starz has the rights to it, plus you can put it on any Plays for Sure video player, so you can watch it at home and on the road. Plus, they offer a flat $10/month subscription. All the movies you want for $10. Flat fee subscriptions are where it's at. I watch movies I'd never pay for on their own, some of them I end up liking, some I don't, but if anything it exposes me to more of the crap the studios are churning out. I've passed on other services with better catalogs, only because I like the flat fee. There are some other options with better catalogs that charge about $4 per download and let you keep them for 30 days. I'm not sure what their portable support is. But Apple's folly is that they are offering it through iTunes, which is solely for your iPod. How much video do people actually watch on their iPods anyway. It would be more successful to cater to the media center PC crowd. I'm all about getting my programing on the intarwebs. I just don't want some crappy Apple DRM all over my movies. I want to pop some popcorn and watch a movie with booming surround sound and a big screen, not huddled over my iPod and not tethered to iTunes.
...they want their bad ideas back.
Why is nobody upset that this ad is sexist? Why isn't it two men fighting? Is it more sexist because they ARE women? Is it empowering to women? Are PSPs just for women? Or is it just an ad that's being overthought with regard to one particularl aspect?
Granted. I don't think it's a great ad, but it's not like it's saying the White PSP is better and the Black PSP is inferior. And that by proxy all white things are better than all black things. Racism implies some sort of derogatory treatment or belief about an entire racial group. I don't see that here. Just because a person's skin color is awknowledged doesn't make the awknowledgement racist. Being black or being white is what a person is. It is not racist to awknowledge that fact.
Get over it.
The biggest myth about music piracy is that people were rejecting a legal option for an illegal one. The reason Napster and the like were successful is because digital downloads were only available illegally. Filetrading was the only way to get a copy of that song you wanted right away. People want digital music. They want to hear a song and get it. Once they can do that legally, the majority of people will choose the legal option over the illegal one, even though it's not free. Now if we can just get rid of all the proprietary DRM that has become a bigger plague than any of the piracy, the world will truly be a better place.
Just recently I beat Pole Position. For years I never thought the game had an ending, you jsut race around the track, blow up, and run out of time. "It's an infinite loop," I thought. But after putting in hour upon hour into the game, getting better lap times, and finally, not blowing up, I eventually got to the end of the game. What a let down though, it gives you your score and then says "Game Over". There's no congratulations or nothing. But now the end of Pitfall has been reached. How many other games out there did we think never had an ending until recently, when the impossible was proved possible? Anyone ever beat ET?
Clearly this wasn't well thought out and may just be a hoax since the web address is still revolution.nintendo.com and wii.nintendo.com doesn't even resolve. Isn't that like the first thing that people do with a new product? Get the domain set up?
I'm just wondering, but one issue that I've heard raised several times is that DRM prevents material from moving into the public domain and violates copyright law? Couldn't a consumer-driven DRM movement (not necessarily DReaM, but something Open Source) build into it's schema the ability to move material into the public domain once the copyright has expired. In this I mean, that this open source DRM would protect the owner's copyright, only so long as the copyright exists. After which, the DRM removes itself, turns itself off or something? I mean, if DRM is going to be accepted it not only needs to protect the owner of the copyright, but also provide something for the owner of the license. The two models that exist are all-or-nothing models. Apple and Sony have a DRM scheme that's anti-consumer. Unprotected mp3s are totally pro-user. Couldn't a consumer movement combine the issues of both camps into something ultimately fair?
If I were Google, which I'm not, I would give away the free wireless without any special patent because it's only going to help me. Why? Because Google ads are already all over the mother-loving internet. I don't need to create new ad space, it's already there, but what I can do is fine-grain my targeting so that instead of serving up an ad for a national mortgage broker, I can serve up the ad for the mortgage broker within 1 mile of the hotspot. It seems like a brilliant plan to me. You are reading an Email through Gmail that mentions Dentist, what is in the ad space? Dentists in your area. Even without creating new space the premium price that Google could charge for this would offset the cost of the WiFi. Sure, it assumes that those using the WiFi would be coming in contact with existing Google ads, but that's pretty much inevitable... and just for good measure, make the user sit through a 30-second rich media advertisement before they can roam free (like Salon's Day Pass). But that's just my 2-cents. Google doesn't even have to do anything like NetZero. They already have presence throughout the internet and once they can offer targeted ads by hotspot, they will have an advantage over overture and everybody else doing contextual advertising and once they've taken over the market they really will have a monopoly and then they can do whatever they want. But if Google doesn't already have this patent, I'm claiming the IP right now for the good of a competitive market.