You made that point, and then went on for several paragraphs casting dubious light on Google's recent actions.
I'm sure it's good for readership numbers to play both sides of the fence, but what are you saying? Wishy-washy pronouncements are weakening your position, whatever it may be.
Google has been placing servers in carrier hotels for years. It just makes sense to have some caching (and possibly web crawling) take place at a carrier-neutral peering point where bandwidth is essentially free. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I would say selling movies, CDs, and books at the theatre might generate some income from the Disneyland, this-is-so-awesome, must-buy-souvenirs-now crowd (AKA chicks) but most consumers won't go for it.
What if when buying a movie ticket, I was given a code that showed I have purchased a license to enjoy said content whenever, where-ever and how-ever I see fit? The studios get their money and I get the material I paid for. If I want the Bluray, I'm sure I would pay a fee for the media just the same as I would pay for bandwidth to download it.
Content providers need to start thinking in terms of a universal license to their materials. I know during this digital transition period it must be great to have suckers pay for the same content several times over but that business model is really not sustainable.
If I take the family to see Wall-E or High School Musical at the theatre and it is as good as expected, you know we're going to buy or download the DVD/Bluray and soundtrack anyway. Why not collect those payments up front and treat me as a valued partner rather than a potential criminal?
Aren't many small payments better than much fewer larger ones? Put the lawyers out of business by licensing your content per consumer rather than per media.
Intuit's tax products have traditionally come with draconian DRM that required telephone activation if you dared to upgrade your computer within the 12 years your previous tax files might be needed.
One slight problem, Intuit only maintains a customer database for the last 2 or 3 years.
Need some tax info from your legitimately-purchased and registered copy of TurboTax 2004? Get out your credit card! Intuit employees as high as the President's office have told me they don't give two shits whether you might have already paid for TurboTax 2004. This is 2008 and they want your money.
They deserve the worst possible ratings wherever possible!
Good point, Vinod. I was in a record store today for the first time in 5 years. Every time one of my kids picked up a CD all I could think about was "We'll just end up ripping this to MP3s as soon as we unwrap it. How inefficient is that? I hope they don't have some lame form of copy protection on these discs, that would add an extra 5 or 10 minutes to the ripping process."
I thought slide 7 was funny "no eight balls were involved in coming up with this ill-conceived idea". Isn't 8 ball some sort of drug slang?
So if an institution agrees to pay the music tax, do we really believe that its members will be given carte blanche to use, trade, share and copy music however they want?
It will be interesting to see university bookstores selling mix CDs, or hard drives preloaded with every song ever recorded!
I predict it would last about a month before the record companies back out.
I just got me the "running water" at my home, and lemme tell ya' I'm washing everything in sight. No more drinking lukewarm, I'm letting it run until it's COLD. I'm filling that bathtub to the top for once." ...
... It wasn't that long ago that homes didn't have running water.
Bandwidth is the new water. It's not unlimited, but it IS abundant.
I dream of the day when everyone has realized that bandwidth is a commodity, just like water, just like electricity.
When will my local utility give me a 'pipe' that offers as much water/power/bits as I need and charge me me accordingly?
I would happily pay for metered broadband if it was delivered the same way my gas, water and electricity are.
I can use as much water as all of my taps will pour out. If I am away on vacation for a month I might not use any at all. If my house is on fire, I can use the hydrant out front to deliver a whole lot of water really quickly.
Give me broadband net access with basically unlimited bandwidth when I ask for it (fire hydrant), AND no fees when I don't use it and I am sold.
If I want to download an HD movie on my AppleTV, I would know that it costs 35 cents in bandwidth. I would know my IMAP connections cost 7 cents per day. If I needed to upload a bunch of stuff to my webserver/office/buddy I would be able to do it quickly and would knowingly pay for the privilege.
I'm sure the Canadian service providers would find some way to ruin it with caps and 'system fees', but in an ideal world metered bandwidth is exactly what we need to convert Internet access from a luxury like cable TV to a basic commodity like water.
I'm not sure how you are breaking SEARCH ads out of Google's revenue. They claim 67% of their revenue is from sites in the Google network, but this includes Gmail, Blogger, Youtube, Google Maps, Google Earth, Calendar, Finance, Picassa, etc.
I know I spend much more time on Gmail and Youtube than I do searching for stuff.
I agree that context-sensitive ads are much more useful and probably generate better clicks as well, but they show up in more places than search.
Interesting article... until Google announced their earnings at 4PM. Huge growth year over year, the vast majority of it from banner ads.
I think you will find smart companies increase their ad spending during a recession. That's how they fight for a bigger share of people's reduced discretionary spending.
Yes, we certainly use lots of Kino-flos (Florescent film lights) these days, but the mainstay is still good ol' 2K's, 5K's and 10K's. (These are incandescent lights using 2000 Watts, 5000 Watts and 10,000 Watts respectively)
HMI's are more expensive and tend to only be used where a daylight balanced light source is required, such as when shooting day exteriors.
It would be interesting to hear from someone in the affected countries to see if the laws make exceptions for theatrical lighting.
Don't worry, you can always come shoot in Canada with our cheap dollar and kick-ass crews.
Great. Just for fun sometime, call your local environmental department and ask for their assistance in cleaning up the mercury spilled from a broken CFL. A woman in Maine did and the final cost was $2000. See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23694819/
A single CFL contains enough mercury to contaminate 6000 Gallons of water.
How will the anti-incandescent laws affect people using projectors, optical instruments, flash lights, vehicles, halogen stoves, motion picture lighting , etc?
This will really help them compete against the iPhone offered only by their competitor with it's cell-tower and wifi enhanced free GPS.
Good move Bell.
P.S. Screw you, Bell, for stealing 120 minutes of my life this week while I talked to your 'people' in Bangalore about the fraudulent charge you added to my bill.
P.P.S All of the Bell executives' email addresses are in the format firstname.lastname at bell.ca. I bet some of you are smart enough to figure out where to send your complaints. It worked for me.
Just so everyone understands, GPS as used in personal navigation systems is ONE-way. Your GPS unit receives a signal from a number of satellites and calculates the time offset between them to pinpoint your location.
Do you really think a $99 device with a small built-in antenna is continually transmitting your whereabouts and that of millions of others to satellites thousands of miles away?!?
Although the article doesn't mention it, the info the police are using would be from people who subscribe and pay for a two-way GPS location system. Typically these use the cel phone network to allow suspicious spouses to track each other, or businesses to know where their trucks are.
Techdirt does not usually subscribe to this level of technology-is-too-scary hysteria.
Read the following press release and tell me what you think it is saying: "Introducing Sympatico Optimax Internet service now available in Toronto! With Fibre Optic technology, this new Internet service consistently delivers maximum speeds of 10 or 16 Mbps... Sympatico Optimax Internet service is the next generation of Internet service that uses the latest in Fibre Optic technology to deliver an optimized Internet experience..."
Besides us Canadians spelling Fiber wrong, doesn't it sound like some sort of fiber to the home service? Even the (idiot) installer who came to set it up said it was fiber. When asked how they would be running the fiber line into my home, he said they conveniently push the fiber optic informtion through my existing phone line! Duh! It's actually ADSL2 with a guaranteed speed at the local node.
Turns out it would be better to call Bell's service "Fibre to the Node" but maybe that wouldn't attract as many gullible customers.
It's actually a pretty good service as far as consumer level DSL goes. They guarantee the 16 Megabit speed (to their test server) and with their convenient 40 Gigabyte per month caps, I can finish all of my surfing for the month in just over SIX hours! What a time saver.
The policy quite clearly states that it is talking about satellites. It would seem obvious that a spaceship traveling from point A to point B does not fit any commonly-accepted definition of a satellite.
Those were NOT cease and desist letters - they were cease and desist EMAILS.
Why do people give these emails any sort of credibility at all? Email, besides being a completely insecure medium, is also very easy to forge.
I have my server configured to respond to legal-looking emails with a message that email is not an appropriate way to deliver legal notices, that the message has been deleted without being read by a human, and that they are welcome to send a certified letter to my registered address if they are certain that their request is lawful and appropriate.
Make the slappers at least do some real work if they want to terrorize you!
On the post: Have The Big Internet Companies Turned Their Back On Net Neutrality?
Re: Re: What is the big deal here?
I'm sure it's good for readership numbers to play both sides of the fence, but what are you saying? Wishy-washy pronouncements are weakening your position, whatever it may be.
On the post: Have The Big Internet Companies Turned Their Back On Net Neutrality?
Best analysis of the day is Here.
On the post: Hollywood Removing Hit Movies From Apple, Netflix
What if when buying a movie ticket, I was given a code that showed I have purchased a license to enjoy said content whenever, where-ever and how-ever I see fit? The studios get their money and I get the material I paid for. If I want the Bluray, I'm sure I would pay a fee for the media just the same as I would pay for bandwidth to download it.
Content providers need to start thinking in terms of a universal license to their materials. I know during this digital transition period it must be great to have suckers pay for the same content several times over but that business model is really not sustainable.
If I take the family to see Wall-E or High School Musical at the theatre and it is as good as expected, you know we're going to buy or download the DVD/Bluray and soundtrack anyway. Why not collect those payments up front and treat me as a valued partner rather than a potential criminal?
Aren't many small payments better than much fewer larger ones? Put the lawyers out of business by licensing your content per consumer rather than per media.
All preceding ideas are © Copyright 2008 BJC. All rights reserved. Contact for licensing.
On the post: Using Amazon To Protest Products You Don't Like
One slight problem, Intuit only maintains a customer database for the last 2 or 3 years.
Need some tax info from your legitimately-purchased and registered copy of TurboTax 2004? Get out your credit card! Intuit employees as high as the President's office have told me they don't give two shits whether you might have already paid for TurboTax 2004. This is 2008 and they want your money.
They deserve the worst possible ratings wherever possible!
On the post: Warner Music Pitches Music Tax To Universities: You Pay, We Stop Suing
Re: extortion?
On the post: Warner Music Pitches Music Tax To Universities: You Pay, We Stop Suing
So if an institution agrees to pay the music tax, do we really believe that its members will be given carte blanche to use, trade, share and copy music however they want?
It will be interesting to see university bookstores selling mix CDs, or hard drives preloaded with every song ever recorded!
I predict it would last about a month before the record companies back out.
On the post: Monster Mini Golf Using eBay To Fight Monster Cable's Trademark Lawsuit
My home theatre is hooked up with the cheapest-available HDMI cables. Ones and Zeros are ones and zeros no matter what overly litigious shysters say!
On the post: The Growing Bandwidth Crunch That Isn't...
... It wasn't that long ago that homes didn't have running water.
Bandwidth is the new water. It's not unlimited, but it IS abundant.
I dream of the day when everyone has realized that bandwidth is a commodity, just like water, just like electricity.
When will my local utility give me a 'pipe' that offers as much water/power/bits as I need and charge me me accordingly?
On the post: AT&T Jumps Into The Metered Broadband Game
I can use as much water as all of my taps will pour out. If I am away on vacation for a month I might not use any at all. If my house is on fire, I can use the hydrant out front to deliver a whole lot of water really quickly.
Give me broadband net access with basically unlimited bandwidth when I ask for it (fire hydrant), AND no fees when I don't use it and I am sold.
If I want to download an HD movie on my AppleTV, I would know that it costs 35 cents in bandwidth. I would know my IMAP connections cost 7 cents per day. If I needed to upload a bunch of stuff to my webserver/office/buddy I would be able to do it quickly and would knowingly pay for the privilege.
I'm sure the Canadian service providers would find some way to ruin it with caps and 'system fees', but in an ideal world metered bandwidth is exactly what we need to convert Internet access from a luxury like cable TV to a basic commodity like water.
On the post: The Traditional Banner Ad Business May Be In Even More Trouble Than You Think
Re: Re:
I know I spend much more time on Gmail and Youtube than I do searching for stuff.
I agree that context-sensitive ads are much more useful and probably generate better clicks as well, but they show up in more places than search.
On the post: The Traditional Banner Ad Business May Be In Even More Trouble Than You Think
I think you will find smart companies increase their ad spending during a recession. That's how they fight for a bigger share of people's reduced discretionary spending.
On the post: EU Will Do More Harm Than Good In Banning The Incandescent Bulb
Re: Re: Lighting
HMI's are more expensive and tend to only be used where a daylight balanced light source is required, such as when shooting day exteriors.
It would be interesting to hear from someone in the affected countries to see if the laws make exceptions for theatrical lighting.
Don't worry, you can always come shoot in Canada with our cheap dollar and kick-ass crews.
On the post: EU Will Do More Harm Than Good In Banning The Incandescent Bulb
A single CFL contains enough mercury to contaminate 6000 Gallons of water.
How will the anti-incandescent laws affect people using projectors, optical instruments, flash lights, vehicles, halogen stoves, motion picture lighting , etc?
On the post: Is Bell Canada Going To Purposely Screw Up GPS Signals To Harm Competitors?
This will really help them compete against the iPhone offered only by their competitor with it's cell-tower and wifi enhanced free GPS.
Good move Bell.
P.S. Screw you, Bell, for stealing 120 minutes of my life this week while I talked to your 'people' in Bangalore about the fraudulent charge you added to my bill.
P.P.S All of the Bell executives' email addresses are in the format firstname.lastname at bell.ca. I bet some of you are smart enough to figure out where to send your complaints. It worked for me.
On the post: Apple Shuts Off Loophole For Podcaster App Developer; He Switches Over To Android
Apple trying to control app developers is like Microsoft trying to control suck.
On the post: GPS Device Data Increasingly Being Used By Police To Determine Where You Were
Do you really think a $99 device with a small built-in antenna is continually transmitting your whereabouts and that of millions of others to satellites thousands of miles away?!?
Although the article doesn't mention it, the info the police are using would be from people who subscribe and pay for a two-way GPS location system. Typically these use the cel phone network to allow suspicious spouses to track each other, or businesses to know where their trucks are.
Techdirt does not usually subscribe to this level of technology-is-too-scary hysteria.
On the post: Plenty Of Broadband Providers Pretending They're Offering Fiber To The Home
Bell is doing that in Canada!
"Introducing Sympatico Optimax Internet service now available in Toronto! With Fibre Optic technology, this new Internet service consistently delivers maximum speeds of 10 or 16 Mbps... Sympatico Optimax Internet service is the next generation of Internet service that uses the latest in Fibre Optic technology to deliver an optimized Internet experience..."
Besides us Canadians spelling Fiber wrong, doesn't it sound like some sort of fiber to the home service? Even the (idiot) installer who came to set it up said it was fiber. When asked how they would be running the fiber line into my home, he said they conveniently push the fiber optic informtion through my existing phone line! Duh! It's actually ADSL2 with a guaranteed speed at the local node.
Turns out it would be better to call Bell's service "Fibre to the Node" but maybe that wouldn't attract as many gullible customers.
It's actually a pretty good service as far as consumer level DSL goes. They guarantee the 16 Megabit speed (to their test server) and with their convenient 40 Gigabyte per month caps, I can finish all of my surfing for the month in just over SIX hours! What a time saver.
On the post: Going For The Lunar X Prize? Want To Take Photos? NOAA May Require You To Get A License
On the post: Multi-Level Marketing Company Threatens Blogger Who Writes Critical Post
Why do people give these emails any sort of credibility at all? Email, besides being a completely insecure medium, is also very easy to forge.
I have my server configured to respond to legal-looking emails with a message that email is not an appropriate way to deliver legal notices, that the message has been deleted without being read by a human, and that they are welcome to send a certified letter to my registered address if they are certain that their request is lawful and appropriate.
Make the slappers at least do some real work if they want to terrorize you!
On the post: Scott Adams To Try Crowdsourcing Dilbert's Jokes?
What is left?!?
Next >>