DISQUS

"per sentirsi un vero artista"

uahuahauhuahuah

Will I need to save or backup any personal files in my picture or videos folders before I upgrade to 8.10? Or will these files be safe?

The package linux-backports-modules-intrepid contains the necessary modules for the Eee's wireless. The array.org kernels are not needed.

After reading each of Ms. Nelson's comments, I find the "positives" she mentions very shallow. The more research I do on Ms. Palin, the "negatives" of her personality, beliefs and actions regarding performance and candidacy at ANY level of government grow enormously. Her selection is an irresponsible charade to appeal to emotions ONLY in this most critical of elections.

On the other side, does Democracy look obvious? Things which we call democracy are hardly that: it is not like Americans have any say on most important issues. They just have to do what their leaders think is good for them.

This democracy is very easy to see: http://www.metagovernment.org/

peace lifes a bitch than u die

C'est juste ce que j'attendais en machine supplémentaire... ça promet :d

Maybe network neutrality isn't such a good word. EF above uses the words 'content and protocol neutrality', which I kind of like. I definitely don't care if isp treat different protocols differently. In fact, I'd really like it if, whenever they detected some voip traffic, they made sure it had priority over other things (within limits). My phone calls would be smoother. What I don't want, is for comcast to block my vonage-voip traffic on the basis that they also offer a voip package. Protocol neutrality, I don't care, so long as I have content neutrality. I can't be the only person in the world to be articulating this thought, really?

How about that: http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/heroes/defa... ?


I haven't dug any further but after reading your post and a friend of mine sending this URL, this just seemed like a perfect match (microsoft, something new, feb 27th).

I used to think that "if I have nothing to hide, I shouldn't mind asking a few questions when I cross the border." After all, that actually did help catch drug smuglers.

Then they took two fingerprints. I thought "Well, it's silly, but there's really nothing they can do with two fingerprints as there's no correlation between fingers. So it's a futile measure, but if it makes them feel better."

Now I have to give 10 and I feel humiliated. I can't explain it, it doesn't make me a criminal, but it feels outrageous and humiliating to have to go through this. I have no first-hand experience with repressive regimes, but this is starting to remind a bit too much of the USSR. Oh, that and the always present messages in airports and public places reminding you to "report any suspicious behaviour to authorities."

Anybody watched 1984 lately?

EF,
I think what you're missing (and I'm not blaming you, I didn't realize this at first either and I don't think Tim did either) is that when you flip through the different "versions" of the graph, the axis get rescaled, but not equally.

Flip to the version 3. Zero on the extreme left and 10 on the far right, with all the spacings being equal. Now flip to version 4 and, magic, the endpoints are still the same, but, the spacings are different. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 are all small and 5 6 7 8 9 10 get progressively bigger. So companies that showed an improvement actually move to the left on their plot.

That's misleading.

To quote Stephen Colbert at the correspondent dinner:

"Make. Announce. Type. Just run it through a spellchecker and go home!"

I thought that joke was a bit harsh, but in light of this...

"One might sell advertising alongside a product--but it had better not be too easy to strip the advertising out and retransmit the product."

Slightly off-topic, but I was thinking, reading this, that advertising ought really to be considered as a product or complimentary product in and of itself. There's no shortage of examples of ads that I keep watching over and over again because they're beautiful.

The Honda Cob commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UScbWzhieNc

The sony bravia ads:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bb8P7dfjVw

In any case, bundling such ads at the beginning of, say a movie at a movie theater, instead of the generally crap advertising I see in such places might actually increase the level to which I would enjoy my experience.

Could you imagine the above honda ad in a 15-20 minutes version which would only be shown at the cinema before certain movies? (Granted, that's basically a movie called 'Der lauf der Dinge' but anyhow.) In some way, I guess this would work in much a similar way as the opening act of a show.

So bottom line, I'm eager to see a time come when advertising will no longer be something to avoid, but something to enjoy, sponsored by the makers of a product.

(end of unrelated side issue)

"How can we quantify the importance of Picasso’s Guernica, for instance, or of Dr. Suess’s, Yertle the Turtle? In most cases, the numbers simple do not exist."

Reading about the situation of copyright in the US (and the world, really, to a certain extent), I'm starting to appreciate that the creative industry incumbents are about to achieve a feat of a framing exercise. They seem to have managed to equate, in the public view, the expressions "importance" and "monetary value". The layman might be tempted to conclude, from hearing of the copyright situation, that works with no monetary value for an investor should go into the public domain. Picasso's Guernica and Dr. Suess' Yertle the Turtle have an undeniable social importance, at least, through their influence on future creative works. That is to say, Picasso's Guernica, locked up in a box, out of the public view, in someone's living room, loses a lot of its importance, yet none of its monetary value. The careful balance to be found, then, is between the importance of a work as a product to be sold and its importance as an influence on the development of culture.

I may not be making a lot of sense, but it seems to me this opposition between corporate (in a loose sense) and social interests is not well explained to those less familiar with copyright law. Letting that happen is letting businesses frame the issue as "if I can still make money off of it, then it should remain mine. Once it has no value, it should go in the public domain."

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we need a catchy leitmotiv with shocking images that strongly carries, in 10 words, the fact that our grand-children's bedtime stories will be made up of today's copyrighted cultural works. Pushing to an extreme, one could say that by our modern standards, cultural evolution is nothing but copyright infringiment.

Doesn't your suggestion simply describe a subset of offerings from groups such as Creative Commons? Or are you suggesting that placing the (¢) be imposed by law for works in the public domain? If not and while I appreciate the need for something simpler than the creative commons marks (although the text cc-by-sa can also be used, which isn't that difficult to type especially considering the placement of ¢), I would think that most of the effort lays in getting creators aware of copyright, copyright law and the benefits of giving up certain rights for certain rights at certain points in your career.

Thanks for posting, Isaac. I've been holding off on updating the comments functionality on my blog, but I'm excited about your stuff.

David, I do remember SideStep - that's a great product. I don't think sidebars are a good standalone business - and I feel the same way about widgets for that matter. Nowadays there are a few services that I don't mind having with me on a persistent basis. To your point, there are very few services that cross that threshold. But I don't think that means that other folks won't compete for that real estate. I'd expect casual games, social networks, feed readers, and email service providers to look to get you to install sidebars.

"An even more effective strategy might be something like Netflix, where you simply pay a flat monthly fee for access to a massive database of every song ever recorded. If they price it right that could generate revenues in the ballpark of 10 cents per song."

Tim, wouldn't you agree that flat fee all you can eat systems only work for stuff you rent, in which case you can set a limit to the amount of stuff you can "simultaneously" enjoy. Netflix works because you can only have 2 movies (or 1, or 4) home at the same time. I think people still want to own their music, mostly because, unlike movies, people are likely to listen to the same piece of music much more often (and probably much more erratically) than the movies they watch. People also want to enjoy their music everywhere, whereas most people only watch movies in a single place. So a technological solution (the "here's this box that lets you listen to movies in your living room through our service" kind of arrangement) isn't practical for music. I don't just want to listen to music in my living room. I want it on my mp3 player when I go hiking, I want it in my office when I work, I want it in my car. I want to have it at partys. I want to be able to bring it to someone else's house. You get the point. This is much easier done when I own the music in an unrestricted format than if you rent it to me, in which case you have to control it. The implementation of the "flat fee" which emusic, audiolunchbox and others have devised is a workable solution, but it supposes that one service must have a large selection of music I want. I'm not willing to pay 10$ a month for the privilege of buying music if I don't want to buy most of it. Music is difficult when it comes to rentals because ti's easy to rip and it's hard to control without frustrating the consumer.

I do agree that in the end, musicians are simply going to offer their music for free (or nearly free) to anyone and everyone to gain awareness. Given what artists currently make off the sale of a cd, they're much better off giving it away for free if it can ensure a packed audience everytime they have a gig somewhere.

Triston, I'm not sure that we'll see an end to that duopoly anytime soon. The credit card (and increasingly the debit card) running on Visa/MC rails is really well entrenched and it would take something really unique to diminish their importance.

Ryan, Wow, that's one of the best comments I've seen on my blog in a long time. I agree that the ability to bring your friends to new applications is a key to the future of social media applications. There are two questions I have, though. I am "old" by web 2.0 standards and you could bootstrap my social network just by looking at my email inbox. Even if you didn't have access to my message stream, you could just give me a nifty contact importer and I would be all set. Why isn't coarse contact information sufficient to make this bootstrap work? If Facebook is the only place you have friend information, you could be screwed - I'm assuming people keep up with people on IM, email, phone, etc. The other argument/question I have is whether people are going to re-invest in creating social maps to take advantage of an open platform. So, if people don't recreate open social maps, will developers build applications with the expectation that people will migrate? And if there aren't any good apps, will people work on creating open maps? How do you crack that cycle?

What I think would be most efficient and pragmatic solution is what economists call a “Ramsey two-part tariff.”

That's how cable and dsl internet was priced in Québec in 1999. I haven't had an account there since 2005, but I believe it's still priced the same way.

I don’t know where the demarcation should be in terms of where the flat rate ends and the metering begins; that’s for market experimentation to sort out.

How about the point where telcos decide to cut-off customers? Up to that point they seem pretty happy with your usage, at least in as much as they'll let you continue. That would logically be their break-even point or at least the point where their return goes below a magic treshold.

Regarding net neutrality, though, while this solves or at least alleviates the bandwidth problem (and I agree with you that metered pricing is a large part of the solution to the current "situation"), it doesn't address anti-competitive practices. If my ISP decides to block or degrade any packet that has to do with my vonage service, I'd be pissed. I know the standard answer to this is to say that "customers have a large array of providers to choose from", but that simply isn't true everywhere. I live in northern new mexico. I have 2 choices, comcast or qwest, with one or the other still not accessible in certain arease. So the choice is really more like 1.5, depending on which appartment I rent. I find it unfortunately foreseable that they would both decide to throttle down any packet that has to do with vonage and then just say that their service is so much better. They both have a huge incentive to do this, after all, they both offer voip service that they try to market bundled with their isp services.

In any case, though, I agree with you that metered pricing is definitely a large part of the equation. Anti-competitive practices still have to be adressed though, and in a way that gives the consumer a direct voice and confidence in the market. It doesn't appear enough for me to say that it suffices for vonage to be able to file against an isp that would decide to put forward such practices. At least, from a consumer point of view.

I gues that's what Joe Gratz says above is the answer to Blafkin. The GPL deals in copying and derivative work, while the first sale doctrine deals in redistribution.

If you buy a copy of a GPL-licensed work, there's nothing that prevents you from deleting the installed software from your computer, putting the CD back in the box and selling it for 5$ at a yard sale.

What the GPL enables you to do is to make copies of the work and it limits how you may license derivative works.

Different issues there.

Weird. I desperately miss Danny Kelly and Alyson Rudd, and have found myself far less excited to listen to that podcast this year because of their absence.


Meanwhile, the one from the Guardian, which was solidly #3 for me last year (behind TheGame and The Beautiful Game) is now probably my favorite.



Different strokes, I guess. Though I do agree that the team of Gabriele Marcotti and Guillem Balague is fantastic. And their conversation a couple weeks ago about Man United, tactics, and different formations clarified the issue for me in a way that nothing else came close to.



So I'm happy to listen to both. Which isn't too bad a thing.

Jeremy, I don't use Twitter much, but I do update my status frequently on Facebook and use my IM status to distribute content (mostly Facebook clips) or give status updates. I guess for me the idea of a disconnected status update service doesn't make much sense to me - perhaps Twitter embedded in other products would make it feel more mainstream for me. Passive status broadcasting is relatively common, I suppose.

Colby, I ended up swapping the Q for am 8830. I prefer the Cyrve keyboard to the piano keys on the 8830, but it's otherwise great.