Crikey is running a story about a possible compensation claim that farmers might have for NOT clearing the land. Now my history is a little rusty but I seem to recall that farmers were once obliged to clear their land or face the prospect of losing their land, according to the law of the day (in Oz).
That farmers are now agitating to get compo for breaking with tradition is
a bit revealing. You might think that farmers, who proclaim loudly to be
caretakers of their land, have decided that enough was enough and the
miserable amounts of native vegetation that have escaped the chainsaw were
to be left for future generations. Not so. The Crikey article refers to
“market forces” for the reduction in clearing, and if there was any doubt
that it was a matter of money, then the agitation for a claim for
financial compo for NOT clearing gives the game away.
As the world hurtles headlong towards the climatic abyss that appears on
the near horizon, you can only despair of a mentality that ONLY measures
the world in terms of how much money something is worth. I am reminded
that you eat food and drink water, money is only one way of getting those
things.
–
http://www.qednet.biz
What does the future hold without cheapish oil? Certainly it will be
significantly different to our current world. With the world population
pushing 7 billion and world oil running out, the likelyhood of a
seamless transition to some new “age” appears remote. What can we
expect? Are the doomsayers correct, will the world plummet into a new
dark age? Have we missed the golden opportunity that oil represents and
instead frittered it away on trinkets and fast food?
Let’s hope not…
This is truly beautiful. The Borg is rumored to be developing software to identify users on the web. Clearly their efforts here haven’t gone unnoticed. As observed on Slashdot, Microsoft operates in the age of corporate feudalism where the only limitations are getting board approval and making a profit. Legality or morality are no concerns.
Software piracy is an interesting area, in the proprietary vendor model. This article demonstrates the linkage between free samples (ie a pirated copy) and market success. There is no doubt that proprietary software vendors are reasonably well aware of the value of piracy to their overall business, particularly when it locks a user into a certain path. Microsoft windows is a classic case, almost everyone who uses a pirate version ends up buying a legitimate version simply to continue to use the functionality of accompanying software.
The pirate is less of a threat to the proprietary software industry than is open source software! Witness the rather extreme behavior of some software manufacturers who demonise the OSS model yet are strangely quiet about piracy.
If you accept that piracy is another form of the free sample, in marketing terms, consider the ubiquitous cigarette. Give a few of those away and look where the manufacturer ends up.
A cynic indeed! Howard Anderson’s article once again trots out
the line that open source exists only because proprietary software
employs coders that “are making their daytime living working for a
proprietary-solutions vendor (PSV) and spend their nights tearing down
the very house they live in” and that somehow this is true of the
entire open source software library.
That is what is called a generalisation. You take a few examples and
assert that it is universally true. His article is a fairly transparent
attack on open source software, no doubt his employment is dependent on
the ongoing financial support of proprietary-solution vendors in the
form of advertising on his publication. However this assertion simply
denies the existence of a large number of OSS producers who do either
make their living by providing open source solutions or are employed by
an organisation to continue the development of OSS. By denying these
people legitimacy, he is able to assert his central theme that only
PSV’s create solutions, and OSS is a leach on real productivity. Anyone
vaguely familiar with the concept of creativity would help Mr Anderson
out by suggesting that PSV’s usually plunder OSS for ideas and that the
very essence of a PSV usually precludes genuine creativity. Please note
the “usual” qualifiers 
Slashdot asks the question 2008 -
The year Internet TV became mainstream? At first blush, the question
seems focussed on current solutions to a problem we don’t actually have,
for example AppleTV. From the perspective of a broadcaster, the problem
is not how to replace your delivery model (ie turn of the big
transmitter and turn on the internet server), rather it is how do you
integrate different delivery mechanisms and maintain your identity?
One thing that IPTV offers is an opportunity to reshape the media
landscape. If startups can succeed in providing a viable model for
packaging and delivering rich media content via the internet in a way
that consumers are willing to adopt, then they will move market share
away from the traditional media. The likely short term scenario is an
acceleration in the fracturing of audiences with the associated
disruption in traditional TV based marketing and information dissemination.
Now there are fish and there are fish. Today I was reading a whale has swum 120 odd kilometers upstream in California - but the other item that has my attention is more philosophical. It is FISH! Go ahead - choose, play, be there and make someones day.
You get more than you think for 8 cents a day. The brightspot was
undoubtedly hearing about Brightmail. The food was average, the coffee definitely sub-par.
From BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6639249.stm
Mobile TV predicted to be a hit
TV could overtake gaming and music as the consumer’s favoured
application for mobile phones, according to research.
Services in Japan, South Korea and Italy are attracting millions,
confounding critics who said people would not watch TV on a small device.