I thought a model similar to the one you describe could be used to fund cult projects. The one I was thinking of in particular was the Red Dwarf film which everyone seemed to be up for but they could never get all the backers to agree at the same time. I would have paid for my DVD copy up front if they promised to return the money if they hadn't finished the film by a certain date. I'm sure a lot of fans would have done the same. I doubt you would have got enough up-front money to cover all the costs but if you could get 20% that would show there is serious interest in the production.

When you look at the price of a paperback book compared to other types of media / entertainment they are dirt cheap. New, I pay about £6 ($9 ish) for a paperback which I will read in about two weeks normally (I have a very busy life ATM so don't get to read that much). Lets say it takes 14 hours to read the book that's less than £0.5 per hour an hour. If I compare that to going to the pub where I can get through a £2 pint in 30 minutes (a whopping £4 per h but it's self limiting) that's looking cheap. A cheap DVD is about £5 and lasts 2 hours.

To make that comparison really fair though I have note that my partner will also read the book and watch the DVD so halve the per hour rate. That makes books 25p an hour and beer 400p an hour. If I drink two less pints a month I can afford reading material all month, that's a fair trade off.

P.S. Finding a good £2 pint is getting hard now but books aren't going up in price much.

There are numerous examples of books where the original text has passed out of copyright but the copy you buy in the shop is still copyright because copyright covers the layout, pagination, cover illustration, any changes to the text, additional commentary, etc etc. You could copy the text and submit it to Gutenberg but you can't just photocopy the book.

AIUI... The amount of work that went into a piece is a key measure as to whether it falls under copyright (at least in the UK). You can't, for example, typically claim copyright on the name of a record or book because not enough creative process when into it.

I buy some used books and some new (I also buy some ebooks now). Charity shops often sell used fiction books for 10 to 50p each. At that sort of price it's just not worth going to the library. I'll grant you that hard backs are very expensive for what you get but if you are willing to wait 6 months it will be out in paper back.

I'm seriously torn here about whether I support the museum or the little guy. I don't think anyone would argue that the original pictures are in the public domain but that isn't what is being shown on Wikipedia, what is getting shown there is a photograph of a public domain work. I think it's fair to argue that a non-trivial amount of work went into taking these photographs and therefore they fall under copyright legislation. If you think it was a trivial amount of work ask yourself how long it took a professional photographer to capture all these shots - I'll bet it ran to at least several weeks of work and probably more (at 20 paintings a day it would be 30 weeks work and I doubt they could do twenty a day).

On the other hand this museum is paid for by the people and presumably the payment to have the photographs taken was also public money. I would say, therefore, that there is a strong argument that these photographs should be in the public domain (at least for residents of the UK). Strengthening the freedom argument, to my mind, is the fact that the museum doesn't allow people to take their own photographs in effect causing a monopoly situation on public works.

If the library had any books that I was actually interested in the library keeping then I would use it all the time. Works of fiction are now cheap enough that I will just buy them. Non-fiction works never end up in the library. Even main libraries in my cities, in my experience, are so out of date on technical works it's just not worth checking them. To be fair even book stores are normally so far behind the IT curve it's not work looking at the shelves.

Perhaps I will check out my local library again for other things that I'm interested where the rate of development isn't a great.

...bow down to our giant blobby overloads.

Hey, someone had to burn some karma it might as well be me.

I don't see how traffic shaping can really work over the long term especially if the main reason for it is to try to stop an activity like P2P which for the most part is in a legally grey area at best. I could understand the ISP offering to route certain types of traffic with a higher priority (assuming you can identify that type of traffic) but something like P2P traffic could be made to just hide amongst the other encrypted traffic.

I'm sure this is already being done but spotting probably P2P traffic should be fairly easy since the source and destination will probably be in residential netblocks. You could even use the IP address range filter used to stop spamming. Of course this would catch VOIP as well but I don't suppose most ISPs care all that much.

Damn you Linux hippes. On my Windows client I'm getting nothing but adverts to make up for all the ones you aren't getting. Yet another reason to hate the penguin.

Slow down cowboy. I make a good living writing webapps so if anyone should want everything to be delivered as a webapp it should be me but I just don't see it happening in the near future. On paper there is nothing stopping it from happening, we've been down the thin client road before and some of the new webapps are very feature rich. In reality though I think we will hit many of the same problems thin clients did. In fact in many respects I think we are starting from a worse position because network latency is much higher over the Internet than it is over a local network. Combine that with the fact that all the applications are developed in Javascript and presented through a multitude of browsers and you have a difficult target to hit.

Long live the desktop application!

The KDE 4.0 release was a total management cock up from start to finish but it did have some positive sides. If they hadn't released it as 4.0 a lot of people wouldn't have tried it out and therefore they wouldn't have found as many issues as they did. They certainly should have worked more closely with the main KDE distributions to make it clear to end users they 4.0 was going to be a dog. With hindsight I think it would have been better to have held off on 4.0 until it was 4.1 quality. That way they would have got most of the user testing but without so much of the "I want to stab you in the eyes for making me ruin my machine".

I don't hold out much hope for Gnome bringing great new things to the party. I try it out every now and then but it just doesn't do it for me in the same way that KDE does. All the Gnome LAFs look terribly dated dumbed down. While I don't spend my days admiring the widgets used in my applications I prefer to look at something that is pleasing to the eye just like I would rather the view from my house was green fields rather than a rubbish dump.

I think you are perhaps missing the point a little. It's not that people support Windows it's that they don't see any huge benefit to moving to another operating system. It's as if they are sitting at the top of a hill and you are asking them to walk down into a valley and back up another hill. Unless the view from the other hill is a LOT better they just aren't going to do it.

I switched to Linux because I'm a software developer and there are some real compelling reasons to switch but that isn't the case for the vast people.

It will be interesting to see what becomes of Chrome. I suspect that it will go absolutely nowhere fast. The only chance it has is OEM installs but unless it's amazingly well polished people will just choose MS because it's simpler to get all their applications working on it.

I've always wondered how useful these images really are. Perhaps to the trained eye they can reveal a lot about how a persons brain works but they have always struck me as being too abstract. We can point at a portion of the image and say that bit controls movement, for example, but if anything goes wrong we are stuck because at a fundamental level we don't understand how it controls movement. I suppose it's a bit like looking at a block diagram for a CPU and not understanding how each bit works.

It will be interesting to see how we achieve the next level of understanding of the brains functioning. I can't see that we will ever get there with MRI or electrode probes because, I think, they are simply too large to get a true understanding of what is going on. I suspect we will gain our understanding through modelling but I'm not sure I'll be around when we do.

I think this is really good news for Linux but I'm going to hold off on breaking out the party hats and balloons for a little while. My main reservation is that it sounds like Google is changing a lot of the basic infrastructure. I'm sure they have studied all aspects of their proposed changes in detail but I'd like to see their reasoning as to why it needs to change. What we have at the moment is not perfect but it's understood and has been shown to work fairly well for many years.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen them team up with Ubuntu and produce a truly world class operating system there. Starting almost from scratch and developing a completely new windowing system seems like a very hard way to enter the market. I suppose though is you are going to re-develop a major portion of a Linux distribution the windowing system would be the place to do it. I've got nothing particularly against X but it feels clunky and stuck in the past.

I decided to have a look at a Theora vs H264 comparison site yesterday. The guy had uploaded a video to YouTube to get it compressed then compressed it with Theora. I couldn't care less what my video stream is encoded with as long as it plays well and looks good so hopefully I approached the comparison with a fairly open mind. If anything I wanted Theora to look better so that the world could become a slightly more open place.

After watching both encodings though I have to conclude that Theora isn't even in the same arena as H264. Don't get me wrong, Theora wasn't bad but it was clearly at least a generation behind in terms of picture quality. The H264 image wasn't perfect but I was amazed what could be squeezed into a .5mb stream.

As for what the browser should support, I'd like to see Theora as a blessed codec so that there is a safe fall back position but I think H264 will win.