Technorati Tags: digital rights, DRM, Live TV is Dead, Open Rights Group, politics, rhetoric, television
It seemed then that the internet might be a liberalising influence, giving the individual more power relative to the State. To an extent this proved true. [...]
Public fear of terrorism gave governments the support needed to tighten systems of social control and supervision. [...]
The British Government took advantage of this opportunity to impose new methods of control that could not have been put through Parliament in normal circumstances. In particular, the Home Office, under authoritarian Home Secretaries, introduced Bills that it had wanted for a long time. The whole balance between the citizen and the State was altered in favour of the State.[...]
In the history of Britain there have been many periods when liberty was threatened. The immediate threat is a government with a lust for control, with little respect for liberty or for the House of Commons, but enjoying the opportunity of using new technologies for social control.
Technorati Tags: digital rights, Open Rights Group, ORG, politics
Guido van Rossum, Alex Martelli, Bram Cohen, Greg Stein and several others on Python
Technorati Tags: conference, Python, SDForum
<div><div><div class="Normal"><div class="paragraph Title_Red" style="line-height: 31px; padding-bottom: 0pt; padding-top: 0pt; ">Hamlet</div>
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</div><div class="paragraph Footer" style="line-height: 16px; padding-top: 0pt; font-family: 'Times-Roman', 'Times', 'Times New Roman', 'serif'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,</div>
<div class="paragraph Footer" style="line-height: 16px; font-family: 'Times-Roman', 'Times', 'Times New Roman', 'serif'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">To give these mourning duties to your father:</div>
<div class="paragraph Footer" style="line-height: 16px; font-family: 'Times-Roman', 'Times', 'Times New Roman', 'serif'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 19px;">But, you must know, your father lost a father;</div>The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.
Technorati Tags: Apple, DRM, Macworld, movie, podcasting, QuickTime, television, video
Too often the best storyteller for a particular audience can win out over someone who is constrained to telling the truth. A current example is the DRM debacle. Any competent engineer knows that the notion of locking up content from those who purchase it and view it on their own computers is technically impossible (setting aside the moral bankruptcy for a minute). The 'content owners' so much want this to be true that they are creating a market for snake-oil that appears to give them what they dream of. Which I suppose is poetic justice of a sort.
let's face it: we're going to have to have some DRM. [...]it's clear that the people who make the consumer technology that ordinary people actually use - the Microsofts and Apples of the world - have already accepted and embraced this. The argument has already moved on.
why the hell does Apple, Microsoft and other Bigs using DRM mean that it's good or that it's "won" a damn thing? Hey, they sucked up to Hollywood for distribution of mass-media Hollywood-type crap. And they're going to screw it up, too. You'll go to Google for your CBS, Apple for your NBC and Microsoft for your ABC. The old sources will be distributed through a mess of incompatible systems, each isolated by their own DRM, and will flush their costly, inefficient and ossified old industry into the hell we've had on the Net with instant messaging for the duration.
by saying that "all DRM is evil" and that only recourse we have is to keep the Internet completely free, and only with independents will we win and we will win, oh yes we will–this not only disregards the actuality of what’s happening now, it also disregards that at times, DRM can be helpful for those not as well versed in internet technologies.(much more in her comments).
Technorati Tags: copyright, digital rights, DRM, ORG
Rohit Khare and Ben Sittler from Commercenet; myself, Tantek and Niall from Technorati, and Ernie Prabhakhar from Apple talk on Microformats
I'm speaking in a session called 'Geek Out' with Scoble and Will Pate
I'm speaking on Microformats and Tags
Technorati Tags: conference, etech, meme, microformat, microformats, MooseCamp, Northern Voice, SDForum, web 2.0
Doc notes the Viiv announcement with trepidation, and also says:
I've almost given up anyway. The other night in the hotel we watched Anderson Cooper, CNN's version of Geraldo Rivera (always On the Scene, always Concerned, always Talking With The People Involved), report for 45 minutes on word that nearly all the trapped miners in West Virginia were saved. In the morning we found out that the report was false. Not from the TV, but from a phone call and from bloggers deconstructing the whole mess.
Live TV is dead. Last week I was waiting for my car to be serviced, (which took 2 hours longer than expected because of a recall), so I sat in a room with CNN on for 3 hours, hearing the 'live' announcers link to the same taped stories over and over again, using the same 'spontaneous asides' repeatedly. It made Dinner For One look fresh and new.
I stopped watching Local TV news years ago - their endless teasing to tide you over the adverts "Bubonic plague struck a South Bay town today - after the break, find out which one" is completely useless in a world where we have Technorati and Google News to find us the answer before they've finished the link.
TV people will be the last to notice this, because "here I am, with the nation hanging on my every word" is the dream that brought them into the business in the first place.
As I said at Streaming Media, the 1940s hack of synchronising everyone's TV set to the same signal was a workaround for having video storage measured in milliseconds.
By the 70s and 80s we had videotape, so TV could be stored, but it required hugely expensive machines that took work from video engineers to line up to record onto giant reels of two-inch tape. So there was only usually one copy of each program, and lots were wiped and reused. Around the time I got there, the BBC realised that tapes decay - the oxide falls off, and that they had lost 20 years of TV recordings by not having a rolling backup program.
In 1998, I went to work at Apple on QuickTime, and started work on live streaming. This was hard work, but interesting - making a personal TV Transmitter for anyone with a Mac, so they could use the internet for lots of people to watch them at once. Having built this technology, I started looking for uses for it, and was rather bemused to find there weren't any.
The problem was storage again. It was always better to have a locally stored copy of the video than to try to get it over the net in real time. It just didn't use the net efficiently, and the 'buffering' experience really sucked. In fact, what I realised was that live TV was a waste of time too. But now we had enough storage.
People spend lots of money on iPods and TiVo's, whose whole purpose is to turn live streams into files so you can pause and skip them, moving the storage into their houses, and pockets. This personal storage is why Podcasting makes sense.
Downloading is always better than streaming, and Edited better than Live, except in one instance.
That difference is when you have 2-way interaction. When you can speak back to the person at the other end, either via iChat AV or Skype, or just by having a textual back channel to a conference.
That's where Live is needed.
Technorati Tags: Live TV is Dead, television, video
Technorati Tags: caliban, hierarchy, hyperlinks
Technorati Tags: 2006, Live TV is Dead, television