there is a lot of legal wrangling over databases. companies like lexisnexis, westlaw and others are constantly suing each other for some sort of infringement or violation of agreements to protect their data. granted, these lawsuits are often breach of contract (non-competes in particular) a fair number surround trademark violations as well.
admitting that Google figured out how to make money and the companies he represents did not. Yet the publishers he represents had all of the advantages in the world. They were local. Google was not. They had been around for many more years than Google. They had brand recognition and loyalty that Google did not. Furhmann is basically admitting what a colossal failure the companies he represents have been. They failed to capitalize on a huge opportunity. And now, when Google sends them traffic, they are still failing to use that traffic wisely.
children and the institutions necessary to adjudicate them are a drain on society.
i don't see why we should continue this nonsense. children ruin everything, why not just ban them instead of letting the government ruin our lives to protect them?
it has to be cheaper to just institute a national curfew that forbids people under the age of 21 from leaving their homes physically or electronically. perhaps a hunting season where it is legal to shoot children for sport would be incentive to keep children out of sight without taxing law enforcement unnecessarily.
just like guns or animals, children are dangerous items that need to be should be registered, tracked, and kept under lock and key.
once public spaces are free from the threat of children, perhaps a little sanity will return to our government and society can return to normal operation.
...says the greedy pirate, illegally gorging himself on a digital buffet of products he's not entitled to.
lol. it stopped being about getting shit for free years ago. now it's all about hastening the arrival of imminent change.
my "consumption" has become so conspicuous that if i hit play right now, i might be able to read/watch/listen to everything i have downloaded before i die.
Given Apple's design strengths, I'd think that they'll come up with something that is basically like a very small MacBookAir... with two screens and no keyboard, perhaps.
i think an 8-10 inch version of the ipod touch with 3g capabilities would sell pretty well, even if it didn't havethe ability to do screens in two modes like the post suggests. if such a device did have that capability it would really shake things up.
the reason i say this is because i bought my wife an ipod touch for christmas and while it never leaves her side, she has yet to play a single track on it because she uses it mostly for apps like facebook, twitter, and for games. she pretty much only uses her laptop for work now.
according to the folks i have talked to, the problem people had with the macbook air was that it was pretty much just a really expensive macbook. i think the power of the ipod and iphone is that they put apple's stuff into people's hands for a lot less than the price of a mac.
the whole reason for the hackintosh community is that there is no moderately priced mac tower or laptop. i think that scaling the ipod/iphone up to the point that it competes with higher end netbooks, ebook readers, and slate computers would do a lot for apple and will appeal to both new users and apple fanbois alike.
it will either a) crash and burn ala Newton (hang on for a while but then fade away) or b) take over the market ala iPod... Micro$oft seems to do most of the former, it just takes longer.
i love a good microsoft bash as much as anyone, but in this case i don't think you are properly comparing the longevity of MS with the short lifespan of technologies in general.
microsoft does a lot of things before apple. there have been windows based tablets and smart phones around for years. there are versions of windows specifically made for tablets and smart phones. MS tailors these offerings primarily to business users and not to consumers; gaming, of course, being the exception. the software and devices windows runs on just don't have the sex appeal that is so important to consumers.
MS is ceding the consumer marketplace after something like 5 years of being pretty much the only viable game in town with respect to tablets, and the next closest competitor to the blackberry with respect to smart phones. if you see this as "just taking longer to fade away" i think that maybe you don't realize that 5 years in information technology is practically a life time.
microsoft has "been there and done that" in these markets and if it's not already moving on to greener pastures, then it should definitely consider it.
It's as if these execs, who have made a fortune from the progression of music and art that has all built upon itself, have suddenly decided that today is the day it's at it's best and has to STOP.
i think it's just the natural progression of business.
as a startup, you measure success in terms of weeks and months, and you care more about your work (your creation or your innovation) than your position in the market. if at some point you become a market leader, you measure success in terms of stock price or annual revenues and so you care care more about protecting your position (and your profits) than you do about your work.
indeed, your work becomes the position and the the profits and the creation or innovation falls by the wayside.
another way to look at it is a small startup or individual creator succeeds initially by disrupting the market, but then grows into a large company that relies on protectionism; it effectively becoming a parody of the initial startup.
from the slashdot comment: The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble... Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble... We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now -- labor capital in the third world.
the future of the global economy is supposed to be large western corporations sending manufacturing over seas to third world countries, and in exchange, those countries will respect our intellectual property and let us sell those products under our brands. our economy is supposed to thrive on licensing revenues, consulting fees, economies of scale, royalties and all the great stuff that comes from "owning" ideas and paying others to implement them. the third world is supposed to thrive on performing all the labor necessary to bring those ideas to life.
the only problem is that the third world doesn't care about intellectual property. IP is a first world problem and it's pretty much foreign to people in the third world.
here in the first world, a whole generation has come up with very little support for the idea of copyright thanks to the ubiquity of file sharing, and it's supposedly destroying everything. at the same time, whole civilizations in the third world are coming online and reaping the benefits of that generation's best practices and will begin applying them to their third world problems.
if every download is a lost sale, and if file sharing costs content industries billions each year thanks to people who attended college in the last decade, what will happen when the entire population of china comes online and starts sharing not just music, movies, software and games, but whole industries?
the first world didn't just donate its manufacturing industry to the third world, we paid them to take it off our hands. we entered into a pact that the third world is not going to honor. we invested in globalizing the economy, but the global economy isn't going to pay us back.
what is western industry going to do when that bubble bursts?
Perhaps it's not too surprising that such a group's only reaction is to fight
to quote eddie "scrap iron" dupris from million dollar baby:
All fighters are pig-headed some way or another: some part of them always thinks they know better than you about something. Truth is: even if they're wrong, even if that one thing is going to be the ruin of them, if you can beat that last bit out of them... they ain't fighters at all.
Windows would be nowhere without legions of unpaid geeks doing tech support.
that's the real problem linux faces: neighborhood amateurs and work-a-day techies who do tech support for their friends and families that are unwilling to step up their game. I KID!
Personally, I would like to see MS busted into two companies now. One for just the OS the other for all other apps. Then we might not see crap like this.
i think a 3 or 4 way split would be better. someone should definitely split the OS and applications businesses, but i think network services like Live, and content services like MSN should be split into their own companies as well.
the reason being that Live (and possibly Bing) could be a lot cooler if it's primary purpose wasn't being a giant commercial for windows and internet explorer. MS is working to bring it's own cloud stuff to bear and i think that separating those services from the windows platform would do a lot of good.
microsoft also has a fair amount of decent content that people like me forget to look at. if that content was freed from the current MS guild system, it might show up in more of my and my friends' feed readers. if the content company got a decent amount of cash in the split, it could cut deals with other content services to be a low cost/ad supported purveyor of high end mainstream content.
those are just theories, and i know that a breakup will never happen, but it would be nice to see all this anti-competitive stuff go away and let MS's good work succeed on it's own merit.
What I'm trying to avoid is an attempt to get started with Linux stifled by my inhuman rage at getting in over my head.
if it's not your main computer there's nothing to get upset about. the worst thing that can happen is you have to keep windows around to run some app that you can't live without.
just start by running windows on your secondary machine and run apps that are available in both linux and windows, and learn to use the apps before you learn to use linux. this way, linux is useful to you before you install it, and you aren't simultaneously learning a new OS and a new set of applications. openoffice, abiword, firefox, geany, gimp, pidgin etc. all have windows versions that you can get familiar with in windows before adding linux to the mix.
this also has the added benefit of making bouncing between machines running windows and linux a bit easier. portableapps.com has a bunch of open source windows apps that you can run from a usb thumb drive, so you can use a consistent set of applications even when you are using windows machines that aren't yours (like school computer labs, libraries, friends' houses, etc.)
then when you feel comfortable using the new apps, start with the ubuntu (or fedora) live CD and see if the network card, video and audio work out of the box, if so, install to the hard drive and never look back. if not, look into cheap replacement cards with good linux support, rinse and repeat.
another route, given you have powerful enough hardware, is to run linux in a virtual machine to experiment with, and then, as you get more comfortable with it, switch your PC over to linux, and run windows in a VM for those times when you need windows.
my thought too. Men would start demanding that you can't have gay people looking at them. And who looks at the kids? uh oh child porn!
that's easy. add a gay line (with gay screeners), a lesbian line (lesbian screeners) and a child line (staffed by children).
you also need a christian line, a jewish line, a muslim line, an athiest line, a fat line, a disabled line...
clearly this will eliminate long security lines and if you require every US citizen to fly once a year, you can eliminate the census bureau as well. it will be a victory for small government.
from that article i think number 32 is more relevant:
(32) The present proliferation of incompatible set-top boxes that aim to connect your TV to the Internet will lead to the establishment of a huge industry consortium with players from three major interest groups (box builders, content providers, software providers), reminiscent of the now-defunct SDMI consortium, and with many of the same members. In 2009, they will generate a variety of press releases but will accomplish nothing.
An initiative called DECE tried to do exactly this, with the predicted results. Verdict: right.
"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys."
toys make really good prototypes. they tend to be small, cheap, easy to understand, and easy to take apart.
in the web world there are plenty of examples of innovations that began with consumers before finding a place in the enterprise: web based email, instant messaging, voice over ip, blogging, virtualization (emulators for gaming hardware), social networking.
sure there are examples of enterprise technologies finding their way down to consumers like pagers and mobile phones, but that tends to be true for technologies that start off as expensive.
I think J.K. Rowling and most authors are not aware of the fact books have been the original pirated media for the past 600 years. People buy physical books and pass them along to friends who pass them along to friends. Ebooks have only created a sub-market.
pirated books have been around since the gutenberg press. history is full of examples of underground presses printing unauthorized copies of books for sale, especially controversial books, or books banned by the local monarchy or government.
always sort your results by the number of seeders seeders. your downloads will be faster, and you are more likely to get a quality release. piracy is a meritocracy. the good stuff gets seeded and lasts while the bad stuff dies on the vine.
On the post: Should Data Collected For Academic Research Get Intellectual Property Protection?
Re: wtf
there is a lot of legal wrangling over databases. companies like lexisnexis, westlaw and others are constantly suing each other for some sort of infringement or violation of agreements to protect their data. granted, these lawsuits are often breach of contract (non-competes in particular) a fair number surround trademark violations as well.
On the post: German Publishers Go After Google; Apparently Very Confused About How The Internet Works
ze traffiks, zey do nothing!
lol lawyers. lawyers lol.
On the post: If School Officials Got Confused By Kid's Science Project, Why Does The Kid Need Counseling?
children are too much liability
i don't see why we should continue this nonsense. children ruin everything, why not just ban them instead of letting the government ruin our lives to protect them?
it has to be cheaper to just institute a national curfew that forbids people under the age of 21 from leaving their homes physically or electronically. perhaps a hunting season where it is legal to shoot children for sport would be incentive to keep children out of sight without taxing law enforcement unnecessarily.
just like guns or animals, children are dangerous items that need to be should be registered, tracked, and kept under lock and key.
once public spaces are free from the threat of children, perhaps a little sanity will return to our government and society can return to normal operation.
On the post: Entertainment Industry Explains How True Net Neutrality Is Just Another Word For Theft
Re: Re:
lol. it stopped being about getting shit for free years ago. now it's all about hastening the arrival of imminent change.
my "consumption" has become so conspicuous that if i hit play right now, i might be able to read/watch/listen to everything i have downloaded before i die.
On the post: The Killer Feature I Would Design Into An Apple Tablet
Re: the feature I'd bet on...
i think an 8-10 inch version of the ipod touch with 3g capabilities would sell pretty well, even if it didn't havethe ability to do screens in two modes like the post suggests. if such a device did have that capability it would really shake things up.
the reason i say this is because i bought my wife an ipod touch for christmas and while it never leaves her side, she has yet to play a single track on it because she uses it mostly for apps like facebook, twitter, and for games. she pretty much only uses her laptop for work now.
according to the folks i have talked to, the problem people had with the macbook air was that it was pretty much just a really expensive macbook. i think the power of the ipod and iphone is that they put apple's stuff into people's hands for a lot less than the price of a mac.
the whole reason for the hackintosh community is that there is no moderately priced mac tower or laptop. i think that scaling the ipod/iphone up to the point that it competes with higher end netbooks, ebook readers, and slate computers would do a lot for apple and will appeal to both new users and apple fanbois alike.
On the post: The Killer Feature I Would Design Into An Apple Tablet
Re:
i love a good microsoft bash as much as anyone, but in this case i don't think you are properly comparing the longevity of MS with the short lifespan of technologies in general.
microsoft does a lot of things before apple. there have been windows based tablets and smart phones around for years. there are versions of windows specifically made for tablets and smart phones. MS tailors these offerings primarily to business users and not to consumers; gaming, of course, being the exception. the software and devices windows runs on just don't have the sex appeal that is so important to consumers.
MS is ceding the consumer marketplace after something like 5 years of being pretty much the only viable game in town with respect to tablets, and the next closest competitor to the blackberry with respect to smart phones. if you see this as "just taking longer to fade away" i think that maybe you don't realize that 5 years in information technology is practically a life time.
microsoft has "been there and done that" in these markets and if it's not already moving on to greener pastures, then it should definitely consider it.
On the post: World Fair Use Day Wrapup
Re: Re: Re:
i think it's just the natural progression of business.
as a startup, you measure success in terms of weeks and months, and you care more about your work (your creation or your innovation) than your position in the market. if at some point you become a market leader, you measure success in terms of stock price or annual revenues and so you care care more about protecting your position (and your profits) than you do about your work.
indeed, your work becomes the position and the the profits and the creation or innovation falls by the wayside.
another way to look at it is a small startup or individual creator succeeds initially by disrupting the market, but then grows into a large company that relies on protectionism; it effectively becoming a parody of the initial startup.
On the post: Explaining The Copyright Bubble... And Why Big Corporations Want To Keep ACTA Secret
desinged by apple in california
The cost to society now outweighs the benefits and we exist within a market bubble right now: A copyright bubble... Like any market-driven force however, it will eventually return to equilibrium. We had the dot com bubble... We stand to lose trillions when this one does. And, ironically, it will be burst by the very forces that businesses are embracing right now -- labor capital in the third world.
the future of the global economy is supposed to be large western corporations sending manufacturing over seas to third world countries, and in exchange, those countries will respect our intellectual property and let us sell those products under our brands. our economy is supposed to thrive on licensing revenues, consulting fees, economies of scale, royalties and all the great stuff that comes from "owning" ideas and paying others to implement them. the third world is supposed to thrive on performing all the labor necessary to bring those ideas to life.
the only problem is that the third world doesn't care about intellectual property. IP is a first world problem and it's pretty much foreign to people in the third world.
here in the first world, a whole generation has come up with very little support for the idea of copyright thanks to the ubiquity of file sharing, and it's supposedly destroying everything. at the same time, whole civilizations in the third world are coming online and reaping the benefits of that generation's best practices and will begin applying them to their third world problems.
if every download is a lost sale, and if file sharing costs content industries billions each year thanks to people who attended college in the last decade, what will happen when the entire population of china comes online and starts sharing not just music, movies, software and games, but whole industries?
the first world didn't just donate its manufacturing industry to the third world, we paid them to take it off our hands. we entered into a pact that the third world is not going to honor. we invested in globalizing the economy, but the global economy isn't going to pay us back.
what is western industry going to do when that bubble bursts?
On the post: Explaining The Copyright Bubble... And Why Big Corporations Want To Keep ACTA Secret
Re: Bailout!
no. bailouts are unamerican. hollywood is very american.
On the post: Google Stops Hosting AP News
Re: They steal too...
try sitting in your closet and crying. it won't make you any money, but you might feel better afterward.
On the post: UFC Plans To Sue Individuals, Despite The Cost Being More Than Any 'Loss'
Perhaps it's not too surprising that such a group's only reaction is to fight
All fighters are pig-headed some way or another: some part of them always thinks they know better than you about something. Truth is: even if they're wrong, even if that one thing is going to be the ruin of them, if you can beat that last bit out of them... they ain't fighters at all.
On the post: Why Does Microsoft Limit Netbooks?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
uh, compiling everything in gentoo improves performance by up to 3% which i think everyone agrees is well worth the 48+ hour install times.
also, punching yourself in the dick feels awesome once you stop.
On the post: Why Does Microsoft Limit Netbooks?
Re: Double standards
that's the real problem linux faces: neighborhood amateurs and work-a-day techies who do tech support for their friends and families that are unwilling to step up their game. I KID!
On the post: Why Does Microsoft Limit Netbooks?
Re: This puzzles me as well
i think a 3 or 4 way split would be better. someone should definitely split the OS and applications businesses, but i think network services like Live, and content services like MSN should be split into their own companies as well.
the reason being that Live (and possibly Bing) could be a lot cooler if it's primary purpose wasn't being a giant commercial for windows and internet explorer. MS is working to bring it's own cloud stuff to bear and i think that separating those services from the windows platform would do a lot of good.
microsoft also has a fair amount of decent content that people like me forget to look at. if that content was freed from the current MS guild system, it might show up in more of my and my friends' feed readers. if the content company got a decent amount of cash in the split, it could cut deals with other content services to be a low cost/ad supported purveyor of high end mainstream content.
those are just theories, and i know that a breakup will never happen, but it would be nice to see all this anti-competitive stuff go away and let MS's good work succeed on it's own merit.
On the post: Why Does Microsoft Limit Netbooks?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
if it's not your main computer there's nothing to get upset about. the worst thing that can happen is you have to keep windows around to run some app that you can't live without.
just start by running windows on your secondary machine and run apps that are available in both linux and windows, and learn to use the apps before you learn to use linux. this way, linux is useful to you before you install it, and you aren't simultaneously learning a new OS and a new set of applications. openoffice, abiword, firefox, geany, gimp, pidgin etc. all have windows versions that you can get familiar with in windows before adding linux to the mix.
this also has the added benefit of making bouncing between machines running windows and linux a bit easier. portableapps.com has a bunch of open source windows apps that you can run from a usb thumb drive, so you can use a consistent set of applications even when you are using windows machines that aren't yours (like school computer labs, libraries, friends' houses, etc.)
then when you feel comfortable using the new apps, start with the ubuntu (or fedora) live CD and see if the network card, video and audio work out of the box, if so, install to the hard drive and never look back. if not, look into cheap replacement cards with good linux support, rinse and repeat.
another route, given you have powerful enough hardware, is to run linux in a virtual machine to experiment with, and then, as you get more comfortable with it, switch your PC over to linux, and run windows in a VM for those times when you need windows.
On the post: Time For 'Israelification' Of U.S. Airports?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
that's easy. add a gay line (with gay screeners), a lesbian line (lesbian screeners) and a child line (staffed by children).
you also need a christian line, a jewish line, a muslim line, an athiest line, a fat line, a disabled line...
clearly this will eliminate long security lines and if you require every US citizen to fly once a year, you can eliminate the census bureau as well. it will be a victory for small government.
On the post: Is Hiding A New DRM Standard Behind The Guise Of 'It Works On Any Device' Really That Compelling?
Re: Re:
(32) The present proliferation of incompatible set-top boxes that aim to connect your TV to the Internet will lead to the establishment of a huge industry consortium with players from three major interest groups (box builders, content providers, software providers), reminiscent of the now-defunct SDMI consortium, and with many of the same members. In 2009, they will generate a variety of press releases but will accomplish nothing.
An initiative called DECE tried to do exactly this, with the predicted results. Verdict: right.
On the post: The Next Big Innovation Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy
toys make really good prototypes
"We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys."
toys make really good prototypes. they tend to be small, cheap, easy to understand, and easy to take apart.
in the web world there are plenty of examples of innovations that began with consumers before finding a place in the enterprise: web based email, instant messaging, voice over ip, blogging, virtualization (emulators for gaming hardware), social networking.
sure there are examples of enterprise technologies finding their way down to consumers like pagers and mobile phones, but that tends to be true for technologies that start off as expensive.
On the post: CNN's Take On 'Book Piracy'
Re: Book Piracy
pirated books have been around since the gutenberg press. history is full of examples of underground presses printing unauthorized copies of books for sale, especially controversial books, or books banned by the local monarchy or government.
On the post: CNN's Take On 'Book Piracy'
Re:
http://thepiratebay.org/search/harry%20potter/0/7/600
always sort your results by the number of seeders seeders. your downloads will be faster, and you are more likely to get a quality release. piracy is a meritocracy. the good stuff gets seeded and lasts while the bad stuff dies on the vine.
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