By AAP and smh.com.au
Labor's hopes of getting its internet filter plan through federal parliament look destined to fail, with the Australian Greens calling for a PC-based approach.
Earlier this month the Coalition announced it would scrap plansfor a mandatory internet filter if it won the August 21 election. Even if it didn't win, it said it would not vote in favour of the plan.
Greens communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam on Monday released the party's cyber safety policy, opposing Labor's mandatory internet service provider (ISP) level filter.
This cost in lost productivity has me wondering at how these estimates are arrived at, and if they really mean anything, after all many industries come up with extraordinary estimates of lost sales due to privacy and yet no real data supports it. I personally think that equating everything in dollar terms serves no real purpose except to highlight the ridiculousness of the assertion in the first place. An opinion piece on the real cost of the disruption on Monday 27
I think that the newspaper industry is a classic example of an industry that is failing to adapt to the new digital landscape and that the unprecedented success in their past has created a sense of entitlement, but in this new landscape they have neither adapted nor are they ready to compromise. This attitude does not bode well for them, because other leaner, fresh thinking organizations such as Apple Corp don’t have the baggage of the past and so only have their eyes firmly planted on the future. Hiding in your shell and demanding that all others do the same, or adopting an ostrich like position with thy head placed firmly in the sand does not a sound business model make, yet any astute observer of the newspaper industries both here in Australia and abroad may have noticed this very stance read what I think about this topic here.
The Australian Government in the lead up to the federal election have announced that owners of pre 1995 cars will receive a $2000 rebate if they purchase a new fuel-efficient vehicle, under a Oz "cash for clunkers" scheme. If the Labor party is re-elected the government will from next January offers a $2000 rebate to car owners manufactured pre January 1995 if they trade them in for a brand-new car meeting fuel-efficient standards. The scheme is proposed to cost $394 million and will be financed by cuts to other climate programs, including reducing $220 million from the solar program. I feel the policy is flawed and explore why here.
Do you have a Sony PlayStation 3? The reason I ask is because if you do are you pissed off at Sony for taking away features and options from the PS3? I first purchased a PS3 in March 2006, 3 days after its Australian launch. I love the PS3 as also I did the PS2 and the original PlayStation one. I have seen every incarnation of these consoles help propel the Sony Corporation a little further ahead in the battle of domination for the gamers’ heart and soul and their hard earned dollars. Game consoles like any technological device have greatly morphed since their first release into the main stream consumer market. I remember the earliest TV game consoles that basically just played variations of the game Pong. In a recent firmware update, Sony removed the ability of consumers to install other OS’s and as a result, seven class actions have been filed against Sony in federal court in San Francisco, California read the whole story here
What if the iPhone 4 prototype had not had been deactivated by Mobileme, what if for some unknown reason the world was per chance a little friendlier and that no one had ever thought for the need to remotely lock a mobile device to prevent unauthorised access and there for there wasn’t an app for that. I know it’s a stretch but bare with me on this, what if instead of a review of a disassembled iPhone 4, Gizmodo had been able to run the phone through its paces and actually publish a true exclusive pre release review of the new upcoming iPhone 4. Would have a full blown review have been able to identify antenna issues prior to the iPhones eventual release? Could we have had Gizmodo come out like Consumer Reports did in the USA just recently and announce that they can't recommend the forthcoming Phone 4 due to problems with the phones reception read my article here.
The content industries have always argued and quite successfully, again I must concede if the legislation that surrounds copyright is anything to go by, that each copy of a piece of intellectual property should have all the same rights associated with it that a physical tangible item does. This was important as technology allowed the average consumer to make analogue copies of others work at little or no cost to themselves that provided no financial reward (read incentive) to the creator and owner of the said copied worked. But now the sale of blank medium is on the decline and so a tax revenue is diminishing and they are looking for more things to impose levies upon, read all the details here.
Australia is in the grip of a federal election campaign and the airways and the internet is full of political comment and advertising when I noticed this clip from The Australian Workers' Union that they posted to You Tube it is a spoof of the Adams family and lampoons The Federal Australian Liberal Party portraying them as the Abbott Family. I don’t think this is particularly creative or becoming of a political advertisement and already a spelling mistake has been identified and that the producers of the clip don’t under stand the difference between their there’re and their, but hey that’s happens on the internet all the time. No in this article I ponder the copyright implications you can read all about it here
An inspirational video and another rant about copyright yet again; Respect that is what is lacking from copyright, fair use is just paid lip service to the self-serving greedy collection agencies, good one APRA I do not know what copyright you hold on the song by Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, however their acts in getting this clip removed is reprehensible and frankly disgusts me. I love the irony that this guy survived Auschwitz yet a video that celebrates this fact can’t survive the greed of the music industry. You can watch the video and get the rants here.
I was feeling nostalgic and detailed my love of the once humble TV; I remember the early days of the old black and white TV holding pride of place in the corner of the lounge room, a majestic piece of technology beaming out the latest adventures of the “Brady Bunch” or Maxwell Smart and agent 99 from “Get Smart”, this was a magical experience that I never wanted to end. Once the radio had like the player piano did before it, engaged families around the globe, but we now we had the TV and the radio was to be banished to the car the TV was the new king of the family lounge room and it was staying put. All the details of the sordid affair are right here.
I took another look at another article on persevering out dated models and I did not take any prisoners; I commented on very similar concept and how another’s idea sounded a little like mine of licensing piracy however I think economist Will Page in his paper “Moving Digital Britain Forward without Leaving Creative Britain Behind” diverged a bit the article starts out painting the current picture of the music industry and the perils it has faced and is still facing. I first took issue with disingenuous comments like litigation was their only option you can read on here.
I have a dig at my least favourite technology company I was back to questioning copyright and the media; with a commentary piece on a ASCAP example of how news organizations could liberate content, skip negotiations, and still get paid. That article suggests that the struggling newspaper sector take a leaf out of the music industries play book and introduce an adoption of the long-established ASCAP-BMI performance rights model by which they could collect payment for some of their content when it is distributed outside the boundaries of their own publications and websites. I did some fiction and the author commented read it all here.
I poke a little bit of fun at Apple and the permanency of the internet; I had deleted it from my muse an article and that should be the end of the story. But only original post had disappeared from this muse the article still existed in search histories on Google there were cached copies. Apple appears to have shifted into full crisis mode over a problem with the iPhone 4 antenna that reduces reception and drops calls when the device is held in certain ways. The company deleted threads from its official message boards and found out that on the internet delete does not work I covered some of it here.
I am again starting to question copyright and as I regularly do post about on this muse when I covered; How we have seen two high profile cases of copyright infringement levelled against ordinary members of the public fought out in the US courts resulting in huge damages being awarded for the plaintiffs. The two separate judges in the Joel Tenenbaum and the Jammie Thomas-Rasset cases won by the RIAA have had their jury awarded settlements reduced by the respective judges further details here
I also explored writers block and my inability to write fiction and so I tackled another piece of fiction; I wanted I to attempt to write a piece of fiction, a story if you will, a flight of sheer fancy but instead I explored another’s piece of fiction, one that they profess to be true, a claim that I believe is nothing more than lies and this fiction that I refer is none other than the claims of lost sales that the world’s music royalty’s collection agencies have bandied around as proof that their industry needs further protection against the ravages of piracy in.