Should the radio spectrum be treated like land (in which you can buy your own plot for exclusive use) or sea (which can generally be used by anyone provided they abide by certain rules of behaviour)? Radio frequencies have historically been sold like land but new technical advances are making it feasible to treat them more like the sea. The Economist explains.
Did you know that the US FDA allows peanut butter to contain an average of 30 insect fragments per 100g?
Amazon.com might be launching a rival to the Apple Music Store. Which begs the question, why the hell didn't they do so years ago?
From Munich to Mumbai, Windows is losing out to Linux. Is this just another part of the long, slow slide towards open source or the beginning of a new avalance?
Geek maven Tim Bray likes Spirited Away (that's Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi if you're Japanese). It was, of course, the winner of this year's Oscar for an animated feature film.
No sooner could lucky iTunes users share their music with the world than Apple took that particular freedom away again. And I never even got a chance to try it. :-(
Having watched a few episodes of his late-night programme on Britain's Channel 4, I can attest that, short of camera tricks and heavy editing, Derren Brown seems to be a truly remarkable guy. He appears to be able to read people's minds by picking up the slightest involuntary cues from their expressions and behaviour, he can plant ideas in those same minds using subliminal suggestion, and he can play cards well enough to be thrown out of any casino in the known universe. Now he's playing for even higher stakes.
Bob Cringely is wrong when he's says that you should never touch working code. Daniel Steinberg explains why: It's because having maintainable code is almost as important as having working code.
No, you don't need to be a spammer to do it. So with thanks to Professor Lessig:
Dear Spammers,If you would like to send me unsolicited commercial emails, then I agree to read them on the condition that you promise to pay me £500, and subject to the additional conditions mentioned below. You can accept this offer by sending unsolicited commercial email to me at spam@hannay.net.
In accepting this offer, you also agree (1) to be subject to the laws of England for the purpose of enforcing our contract, (2) to pay any costs, including legal fees, incurred in enforcing our contract, (3) to pay your obligation under this agreement within 10 days of sending the email, by mailing a cheque to me at 31 Adamson Road, London NW3 3HT, UK, and (4) to accept service and costs associated with any bill collector that I hire to help collect obligations owed me under this contract.
Timo Hannay
I hope I have as much success as Larry.
Hot on the heels of this revelation comes this news about Microsoft's latest plan to commercialise the output of their R&D department (aka Apple).
Having travelled through some of the more totalitarian parts of Africa, I'm used to having to hide cameras away at border posts and other government buildings. But I never thought I'd have to do the same in a coffee shop here in the 'free' world.
Some people are rising to challenge. I'll also see if I can get some snaps of the Starbucks down the road (England's Lane, London NW3) and post them here.
Our broadband connection got cut off yesterday. On phoning BT it turns out that the credit card I had been using to pay for my account has now expired. It would have been nice of BT to tell me this before cutting us off but it's no less than I expect from a company whose inexhaustable incompetence has been giving me grief for a year now. It would take a whole website to describe all the things they've screwed up during that time. Hey, there's an idea...
Saw this film on the plane back from LA. First time for ages that movie has moved me to tears. And this one isn't fiction.
Following on from this story, someone at Kuro5hin reports a PHP-based snare for RIAA spiders. Nice one!
Hilary Rosen, head of the RIAA, has written a piece for Business 2.0 in which she tries to come over all technology- and innovation-friendly:
As I prepare to leave my post this year, I'm proud that part of my legacy will be the role I played in championing new technologies.
Hahahahahahaha!!! Good one, Hilary! Then why did it take Apple to show you the way? From where I'm sitting, the record industry still doesn't appear to have an ounce of imagination or courage. Though it might be a bad idea, something inside me would love it if Apple ate Universal Music.
Nobody seems to know exactly what's going to happen to UK house prices over the next year or so. But it doesn't help when the same report gets such different coverage depending on whether you read about it on BBC News or Guardian Unlimited.
"Hitting 1m songs in less than a week was totally unexpected," said Warner Music chairman Roger Ames recently. "Apple has shown music fans, artists and the music industry as a whole that there really is a successful and easy way of legally distributing music over the internet," he said.
The only amazing thing is that it took Steve Jobs to make anyone in the record industry relaise this. Don't they have a brain between them?
Microsoft claim that their iLoo was an April Fools' joke. But the joke's on them.
Update at 07:48: It's not a gag after all. Even funnier than if it had been.
The Evening Standard has faked a picture on their front cover that showed a jubilant Iraqi crowd in order to make the crowd appear bigger. They deny any wrongdoing but the picture seems to speak for itself.
This is just too delicious not to post. The RIAA have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Penn State University because they host a site with the words "Usher" and "MP3" in it. Except that it's Professor Usher and he's posted an MP3 of an a capella song performed by his fellow stronomers about the Swift gamma-ray satellite.
So, RIAA, come and get me too:
Shio_of_Fools_Erasure.mp3, Big_Mistake_Natalie_Imbruglia.wma, Dont_Stop_the_Music_Lionel_Richie.ogg, Burn_For_You_INXS.wav
A piece on Kuro5hin argues that the costs of witholding potentially dangerous scientific and technical information are greater than the costs of releasing them. I tend to agree. The collective wisdom of scientific journal editors reached a somewhat more cautious conclusion. However, a recent article in The Economist expresses doubts that this caution is having much effect in practice.
I'd quite like to enter the Shell Economist writing prize this year. Must remember to submit by 22 August.
Clive Crook has written another great survey for The Economist, this time on global finance. The highlights for me:
Global financial flows do indeed need close regulation, much more so that flows of goods and services. This is a bit of climb-down (though a sensible one) from The Economist's normal hard line on liberalisation.
The best way to overcome the moral hazard experienced by banks is to force them to issue subordinated debt (debt that returns a fixed interest but doesn't get repaid in the event of a collapse). Nice logic!
Spiked asked 40 scientists to list dicoveries that would not have been made if today's risk-averse approach to science had prevailed in the past. Their collective response: "pretty much everything".
Matt Ridley also had a rather nice piece in The Guardian explaining why there can be more risk in impeding progress than in promoting it. My favourite bit:
"Organic farming is sustainable," says Indian biotechnologist CS Prakash. "It sustains poverty and malnutrition."
Longhorn's myContact's screen (taken from this preview) looks like a more or less direct rip-off of Compendium (see this site for more info.).
An English professor seems to wish that his fellow humanities academics were more collegial and honest — like scientists. Trust in peer review, in particular, seems to be very different in the two realms. A touch of 'the grass is greener' I think, but interesting nevertheless.
According to William Gibson, blogging went mainstream during the first week of the Iraq war:
On a Monday, I'd mentioned to a friend in Vancouver that there was a guy in Baghdad who was blogging and my friend asked me "what the fuck is blogging?" By the Friday, blogging was being discussed on the evening news.
As Slashdot has pointed out, life is now imitating The Onion. Never ones to miss a toilet humour opportunity, Slashdotters responded in droves. My personal favourite posting:
RandomGuy: Hey, I really gotta go. Can somebody clear a stall?
From Stall #1: Sorry, checking my email. I'll be a few minutes.
From Stall #2: I'm busy trading my life away on ETrade, piss off!
From Stall #3: *fwap* Almost *fwap* done! *fwap*
From Stall #4: We're out of paper in here, I'm contacting technical support!
RandomGuy: (Eyes crossed, making odd grunting noises, Exits)
I liked this piece from Business Week. My favourite bits:
...[T]he piracy problem is behavioral, not technological... Since Napster's rise, [Steve Jobs] has missed few opportunities to declare that he thinks the music industry stumbled big-time when it came time to figuring out an online music strategy. All along, Jobs has espoused an approach the makes buying music online easier rather than one that tries to make pirating it harder... The iTunes Music Store is a perfect example of this approach, with minimal antipiracy controls but a low-enough price that lots of people will feel they're getting a good deal when they click the "buy" button.
...Of course, the labels could try to keep the music within their own retail operations. But Jobs saw he could do it better and more easily than the labels. His big edge: The labels have been so busy promoting individual artists over the years that they never built a real brand name for themselves.
Joe Sixpack looking for tunes online gives a rip whether they're coming from Arista or Columbia. Chances are he doesn't even know who owns those labels. But he does know that he can download his Eminem fix at Apple.com.
Apple is heralding a new era of online retailing, where the retailers will have the same kind of brand recognition as Apple -- perhaps Amazon, eBay, or Yahoo!. The labels will from now on play this game at a distinct disadvantage not only because they lack a true brand name but also because they have forever lost control of distribution.
Yeah! :-)
