[Quote:]

New federal legislation says universities must agree to provide not just deterrents but also “alternatives” to peer-to-peer piracy, such as paying monthly subscription fees to the music industry for their students, on penalty of losing all financial aid for their students.

Find one mp3 too many on campus and bankrupt the university. Smart.

So now the new goal of the RIAA and MPAA is to deny an education to as many people as possible. Apparently they think uneducated morons are the only ones left who are willing to give them money. They may very well be right.

[Quote:]

Customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with the high-definition format wars—Sony CEO Howard Stringer is reaching the end of his rope as well. Blu-ray, which is backed by Sony, was doing well up until recently and winning the war based on merits, Stringer said at an event in New York. That is, up until movie studio Paramount decided to “change sides” and go exclusively HD DVD in August. Things have apparently become more difficult since then, and the high-profile CEO is showing signs of wear.

“It’s a difficult fight,” Stringer was quoted saying by the Associated Press, going so far as to describe the situation as a “stalemate.” He candidly indicated that the war mostly came down to bragging rights over who was winning, and said that the two camps could have collaborated better in the past to develop one format. Stringer even said that he wished he could go back in time to make that possible—is that the smell of regret floating in the air?

No, he’s just upset that consumers failed to become his bitches.

While he’s got that time machine, how about avoiding BetaMax vs VHS, MemoryStick vs. SD, Atrac3 vs. mp3, MicroMV vs. MiniDV, SACD vs. DVD Audio, Minidisc, UMD, naming FireWire “iLink”, rootkits, and all the other Sony blunders?

[Quote:]

It’s hard to say for sure when the “silly season” started in the media’s coverage of the presidential campaign. If there was a “serious season,” it was exceedingly short. I’m afraid I missed it.

But yesterday was unusually inane. A waitress at an Iowa diner noted that Hillary Clinton and her campaign aides had recently stopped by, but didn’t leave a tip. NPR picked up on the “story,” the New York Times called it a “potentially embarrassing mini-scandal,” and Drudge blared it above the fold. Soon after, NBC News and ABC News were trumpeting the story.

Clinton didn’t leave a tip? Does she hate working people? Is she out of touch? What does this say about her economic plan? What do her rivals think about this? Why won’t Barack Obama attack her over the issue? Is it too soon to put a poll in the field gauging the public’s reaction?

All of this breathless fascination was for naught. It turned out Clinton’s campaign did leave a tip with the manager for the entire serving staff. Clinton’s individual waitress didn’t know that, so there was a simple misunderstanding.

Reporters ended up contacting the waitress, Anita Esterday, at her home in Iowa yesterday.

Ms. Esterday said she did not understand what all the commotion was about.

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Thank you, Anita Esterday. “You people are really nuts” may actually be the most helpful and poignant media criticism I’ve seen this year. It has the added benefit of being true.

[Quote:]

Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries–including the United States–against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.

[..]

By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would also make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.

“There is no way that they will have any defense because it’s blatant piracy,” Giacobbi said. “They’ll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we’re going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can’t outrun this. We are very confident.”

Good luck enforcing your default judgments…

[Quote:]

A health insurance company serving customers in a half-dozen states set out to drop hundreds of customers and paid lucrative bonuses to an executive in charge of eliminating coverage.

One customer is suing the company, Health Net Inc., after a company salesman pressured her to switch to a Health Net plan only for the company to cut-off her coverage in the middle of costly cancer treatment.

California small-business owner Patsy Bates was one of more than 1,600 customers who had their Health Net policies rescinded between 2000 and 2006 saving the company $35.5 million, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Over the same period the senior Health Net analyst in charge of canceling policies received more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting annual targets for revoking the coverage.

Insurance companies don’t exist to insure people, and that’s the problem.

[Quote:]

The Canadian police announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers instead of the cash flow of large corporations.

[Quote:]

Introducing NBC Direct. Follow the steps below to download full episodes of NBC shows for free and enjoy them from the comfort of your PC (requires Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player 10).

Windows only, IE only, DRM only, USA only.

Yep. This will certainly get people to stop using torrents.

[Quote:]

It’s a topic that jumped up like a stunned ferret from God’s own hot plate three separate times recently — indicating, I think, that I’d better pay some sort of attention to it — the topic being the obvious but still desperately under-discussed idea that perhaps the most dangerous problem facing man in this modern age of radical technology and dazzling scientific conundrum and otherworldly raspberry vodka and ever-expanding notions of love and sex and human interconnection is the sad and treacherous fact that, well, religion and belief as we know them in America are, by and large, far too horribly stuck, limited, fixed in time and place and stiff karmic cement.

Put another way: We as a culture just might be suffering a slow, painful death by spiritual stagnation, by ideological stasis, by cosmic rigor mortis. It has become painfully, lethally obvious in the age of George W. Bush and authoritarian groupthink that our major religious systems and foundations don’t know how to move. They don’t learn, adjust, evolve, see things anew. They don’t know how to dance. And what’s more, this little problem might just be the death of us all.

The idea is everywhere, and not just in the obvious, sour religious outhouses of evangelical Christianity and fundamentalist Islam and rigid Catholicism. It even popped up while I was in conversation with tattooed Buddhist and author of “Dharma Punx” Noah Levine at the Roxie theater during LitQuake ’07, he and I chatting about the dangers of dogma and the problem of trying to adhere too closely, too severely, to classical Buddhist rules of behavior, concluding that even Buddhism has its dangers, its limits and its issues and general theological potholes.

Levine, a fairly conservative Theravadan Buddhist, admitted that even he had to seriously adjust some of those old rules to make them tolerable and digestible, particularly in regards to how poorly classical Buddhism valued women and the feminine principle (not to mention other rather impossible dietary and lifestyle restrictions), outmoded ideas that sort of make you wince and cringe and say no no no, Buddha couldn’t really have meant that, could he?

Ultimately, Levine is much like any other honest, modern Buddhist in that he will see these apparent snags and merely shrug, and then choose what rules and notions from the ancient texts work for him in the modern world. Arguably, the beautiful thing about Buddhism is that, by and large, it seems to willingly allow for this adaptation, welcomes it and encourages it, in the full understanding that, so long as clear, divine intent is in place, there can be no real threat to the Four Noble Truths, to the honest path. (Though there is no shortage of strict Buddhist sects who believe their version is the one true way.)

[Quote:]

Onze Grote Leider, potentaat JPB, vandaag op het CDA congres. Volgens Balkenende heeft het CDA vanaf 2002 steeds de verantwoordelijkheid genomen voor lastige maatregelen, zowel economisch als op het gebied van normen en waarden. De partij werd aanvankelijk weggehoond, aldus Balkenende. “Maar uiteindelijk begon iedereen in te zien dat dit bittere noodzaak was. En we gaan er gewoon mee door.” Kortom, u wordt ontslagen, u raakt uw hypotheekrenteaftrek kwijt, en u krijgt elke maand controle vanuit Brussel of uw wandcontactdozen wel op de juiste hoogte zitten.

[Quote:]

Automakers back legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives that would require cars to average 35 miles per gallon and light trucks 32 miles by 2022.

And now they have their own website as well.

Whoop-di-fucking-doo. If you get a 15 year old Golf TDI from Europe it already gets that mileage. All the cars I’ve ever owned get more than 40, but the US needs legislation or they’ll fail?

Losers.

[Quote:]

Mensen die bij leven een nier afstaan voor donatie moeten levenslang een gratis ziektekostenverzekering krijgen. Dat voorstel doet de Raad voor de Volksgezondheid en Zorg (RVZ) in een adviesrapport, schrijft de Volkskrant zaterdag.

Momenteel is het tegen betaling afstaan van een orgaan wettelijk verboden.

De RVZ vraagt zich in het rapport, dat maandag wordt gepresenteerd, af of de overheid een beloning voor orgaandonatie nog langer kan verbieden.

Just saw a riddle that people appear to find rather difficult:

[Quote:]

You have 12 small balls. All look exactly the same, and weigh exactly the same; they are duplicates. But one of the balls is an exception: it is either lighter or heavier, but looks the same.
You are given a double-sided weighing machine (ie. counterweighing) to find out which ball is the exception, and whether it is lighter or heavier than the others. You have 3 uses of the weighing machine.

And thinking through made me realize that if you know the ball is lighter (instead of “lighter or heavier”) you can do the same puzzle with 27 balls. Feel free to put the answer in the comments, if you can find it…

[Quote:]

Journalists and PR minders outnumbered buyers on Friday night as interest in Apple’s iPhone miserably failed to live up to the pre-launch hype in the UK.

The iPhone went on sale at stores operated by retail titan Carphone Warehouse, exclusive operator O2, and Apple’s own retail chain. The days preceding the launch had been filled with pages of coverage from posh papers and broadsheets alike. O2 announced it was employing 1,400 extra staff to cope with the short-term demand. Even Carphone’s PR staff were dispatched to far corners of the land, to provide expert advice to the masses clamouring for iPhones.

But now it looks as if a tight-knit group of media and PR people got caught in a feedback loop. The “event” they imagined simply failed to take place.

The first signs that reality was not following the script came at 7pm, from a Reg reader at Brent Cross. Perched by Wembley on the North Circular, Brent Cross is a shopping hub reaching into millions of affluent punters in Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire, as well as the metropolis itself. He noted that the Carphone and O2 stores were empty of punters, with only “the usual” smattering of shoppers at the Apple Store, playing with iPods.

All it shows is that the mobile phone market here is quite different from the one in the USA. But you’d think journalist would know that..

Anyway, let’s look from another angle. I import a phone for USD 399, which is about EUR 280 at the moment. I have a 250 minute SIM-only plan that sets me back EUR 9,50 a month, and unlimited gprs for EUR 9,95. Let’s round that up to EUR 20 together, so for 2 years, an iPhone would cost me 280+(24*20)=EUR 760. Let’s also assume that the German t-mobile will get the Dutch contract, for similar prices. I would have to pay EUR 399 for the hand set, EUR 25 for an “activation fee”, and a contract. There’s a 200-minute contract that would be too few minutes for me, and at EUR 0.39 per minute extra the next larger contract is the best option. That would be EUR 89 a month. So, total for the two-year minimum: 399+25+(24*89)= EUR 2560.

Now tell me again why Apple sees so many handsets “disappear” without contract from the US market, and why the UK launch fizzled…