09.04.07
Posted in General at 9:41 pm by Clay
In today’s Marketplace section, Yukari Iwatani Kane wrote from Tokyo about Sony. The article was titled “Sony to Challenge Apple in TV, Movie Downloads”. It mentioned that,
Since the failure of the Walkman to beat the iPod, Sony has been struggling to come up with a new product that defines the industry standard in innovation.
This general idea of Sony failing since losing to the iPod is repeated throughout the article, along with some conjecture about what Sony is likely to do to turn its fortunes around.
However, I find it odd that the article doesn’t mention the reason why most everyone I know(and Slashdot) has developed a distaste for Sony hardware; the fact that Sony releases moderate quality products that are crippled into products that worry most about stopping you from doing stuff.
This hit home recently when I was playing with a PSP, and went to download a trailer for a PSP game, and had to agree to a EULA before I was allowed to watch it.
Again, I had to agree to abide by certain rules so that I could watch an ad.
Sony has a history of having propietary devices that lock you out about as much as American cell phones do. When you can choose an iPod, which plays MP3s and Apple’s format, or the first few generations of Sony MP3 players, which played only Sony’s format, the choice is obvious. Why would you want to force yourself to convert all of your files in order to play them? It takes a lot longer, the files are lower quality, and you can’t just copy them to another player or computer.
Sony’s methods can work, as long as all the other hardware providers provide equally restrictive hardware, but as long as Sony is competiting against hardware makers who worry more about marketability than pleasing content companies, I fail to see why anyone would want to buy Sony products.
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08.18.07
Posted in General at 2:46 pm by Clay
C-Span rebroadcast a recent Republican presidential debate that appeared on ABC, and I was struck by the fact that the moderator started off with the current Iowa polling numbers of the candidates on the stage, as well as Fred Thompson.
This bugs me. I’m not sure how reasonable it is for me to be bugged by it, but I just have this image of a debate being something where one candidate does better than another based on his performance on the stage, or because of how people view the issues, rather than forming an opinion on the candidates because of the current polling data.
On the other hand, it’s a bit pie in the sky of me to even bother pretending that most of these candidates have even a tiny shot at the nomination.
Still, aren’t the producers of this dog and pony show pretending in exactly the same way when they have all the minor candidates on the stage? And if they’re going to pretend that the “non-serious” candidates are serious, why doesn’t that extend to ignoring things like polling?
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Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 8:52 am by Clay
In an SFGate article, linked to from Darknet:
Fox News has no plans to offer unlimited use of its debate content.
“That, to me, is giving up too much control to somebody who didn’t create the content and who can then turn around and monetize it,” said Chris Silvestri, vice president of legal and business affairs at Fox News.
Because, of course, it’s rather difficult to assemble ten politicians who already intend to pay large sums of money for media exposure.
Way to go, Fox; way to push the envelope on creativity, going where no one without a network and video equipment can go, but everyone with a network has gone.
I hope(unrealistically) that some politician will boycott the Fox News debate because of Fox’s morally repugnant stance on copyright of debates, so that I could have a clear candidate to whom I would gladly give my vote and money to.
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07.14.07
Posted in General at 10:31 am by Clay
…statistics.
An AP article that appeared on the front page of today’s Wisconsin State Journal stated,
In the eyes of the public, Congress is doing even worse than the president. Public satisfaction with the job lawmakers are doing has fallen 11 points since May, to 24 percent, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.
Poll respondents from both parties say they’re tired of fighting between Congress and the White House and want the two branches of government to work together on such issues as education, health care and the Iraq War.
So congress has an approval rating of 24 percent versus Bush’s 33 percent; therefore, congress must be less popular than the president, right?
Of course, if you were to ask people how they felt about their representative, they would almost certainly give a much higher approval rating.
As a personal aside, I’d rather like to see the two branches of government work against one another. I can only hope that congress can obstruct the president and force him to be more open than he has, and I can only hope the president can obstruct congress enough to slow down the pork fest.
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06.23.07
Posted in General at 11:25 pm by Clay
I think it’d be entertaining to begin referring to children as “post-born fetuses”.
This idea came from hearing “pre-born child” used in a news report, and the term grated on me — there’s this perfectly accurate term that’s viewpoint neutral. I find “fetus” a much better term as it’s a description of what’s growing inside of a pregnant woman; it doesn’t say whether the woman wants it or intends to kill it.
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05.30.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law, Freedom of Speech, General at 7:52 pm by Clay
There’s an article on Slashdot today about McCain’s appearance at D5: All Things Digital conference. Despite the fact that it’s supposedly about “all things digital”, about half the questions are about the Iraq war. Being annoyed about the fact that an “all things digital” conference spent lots of time talking about Iraq, rather than, oh, digital things, I wrote a comment on Slashdot that sparked a nice conversation of mostly me ranting.
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04.12.07
Posted in Freedom of Speech, General at 9:41 pm by Clay
I imagine most of you have already heard about Don Imus getting fired for referring to the women on the Rutger’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos”.
This incident has taught us a couple of things: First, use of the word “nappy” will get you branded a racist. Second, it’s perfectly okay to publicly discuss the relative merits of the physical beauty of women in all areas of life, just so long as you don’t include the slang word “ho”.
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03.18.07
Posted in General at 10:23 pm by Clay
Continuing my love for contradicitions, I present for you bits from two articles: One an opinion article in the February 24th, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal by Maureen Martin, an attorney who is senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute, and the other from the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal on March 6th. I’ll present them in a back-and-forth format.
For the past few years, some judges in Wisconsin have been rewriting state law from the bench. Now it’s possible that they soon may go even further by rewriting the Wisconsin constitution.
Ziegler said she uses a “gut check” to decide if she has a conflict of interest.
There is a disconnect between traditional democratic principles and the notion that citizens need not uphold provisions of state and federal constitutions with which they disagree.
Supreme Court rules state that judges have a conflict of interest in cases in which they or a spouse are a party to the case or “an officer, director or trustee of a party” — in this case, [West Bend Savings Bank, where her husband is on the board of directors(or, as found out later, the cases with companies in which she owns more than $50,000 in stock.)]. A judge must act on the conflict “as soon as the judge knows of the conflict,” said James Alexander, executive director of the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, which enforced the Supreme Court rules governing judges’ conduct.
Once a conflict is discovered, judges have two choices: withdraw or offer the parties the oportunity to waive the recusal, Alexander said.
Now, I’m not about to say that, for sure, Linda Clifford is better for Wisconsin than Annette Ziegler, just because we’ve found out that, as a judge, Ziegler has previously not bothered following the rules. What I will say is that this election is about one thing: Do you prefer to have conservative justices make stuff up from the bench(vote for Ziegler!), or do you prefer to have liberal justices make stuff up from the bench(vote for Clifford!)? Pretending that the liberals somehow have a lock on ignoring the law(constitutional or otherwise) is ridiculous.
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Posted in General at 9:47 pm by Clay
I love letters to the editor. Why? Because they often make no sense and are seemingly written by crazy people. While I intend to have a questionable logic series at some point, the topic for this post is kidneys.
Or, rather, how to increase the amount we have, without doing ethically distasteful things. A seemingly non-crazy Harold G. from Chicago had a letter published in the Thursday, March 15th, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal that stated:
Today, it is a felony for a kidney donor to receive any form of compensation. It is assumed that compensated donors would be poor and forced, in desperation, to sell a body part to someone rich enough to pay for an organ. That would be terrible and should be unacceptable to everyone.
He then immediately says:
However, millions of individuals are perfectly capable of making a rational, well-reasoned decision to have a safe laparoscopic procedure that usually requires a 24-to-48-hour hospital stay in return for financial assistance that could make a real difference in that individual’s life
So, in other words, it’s just fine to have someone poor give their kidney to someone rich for money. We just have to make sure that everyone views it as the wonderful thing that it is; poor people get richer, rich people avoid dying.
The thing is, the letter writer is for living kidney donations in order to save more lives. The problem is that, if you have a financial incentive, occasionally people are going to do it for the money.
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02.10.07
Posted in Copyright/Trademark/Patent Law at 7:59 pm by Clay
Steve Jobs had an interesting, and somewhat surprising message about iTunes’ DRM. To quickly summarize, he says that Apple would be perfectly willing to have DRM-free songs, if only the music labels would allow it.
I have to agree with DVD Jon’s position; Steve Jobs is looking out for Apple, and is just using his reality distortion field to make it seem as though he’s fighting the good fight.
And, frankly, from Apple’s point of view, this is a wonderful idea; he’s phrasing the iTunes DRM issue as, “We’d be happy to sell MP3s, but the record companies won’t let us.”, instead of, “We don’t want to have a DRM that everyone uses; that’d make it easier for users to use a non-Apple MP3 player.”.
This is important because Apple is currently fighting with several European countries about the fact that their DRM won’t work on other company’s players. So, Steve’s pretending to take the high road might help him fend off the governments trying to crack Apple’s dominance.
That said, I hope he succeeds. I hope he succeeds with his reality distortion, as it frames the debate as being restrictive DRM versus no DRM. That means that, eventually, if Apple has near total control over the digital music industry, the record companies will release more things as MP3s, because they don’t want to be beholden to Apple.
The thing is, DRM is always annoying, as that’s the point; DRM’s purpose is to stop you from doing what you want to do. And, frankly, if you want to do illegal things, you’d be much better off stopping at my library, borrowing some CDs, and ripping the songs yourself. It’s hard to trace, easier to use, of whatever quality you desire, and is free. Or you could use one of the file-sharing programs; it’s only the legal, above-board users who get to be treated like law-breakers.
So go, Mr. Jobs; make the world think that you’re leading the fight against DRM. Maybe eventually the people will know what “DRM” stands for, or at least that it’s a bad thing that we don’t want.
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