And I suspect they will not be for a long time. They run a good service and if they what to get rid of a couple of freeloaders, thats their prerogative. They managed to survive on small markets, so there's quite some opportunity. For me, I stopped buying cd's, I stopped searching for music for ages (the top iof the chart is easy to find, but Spotify has all the less well known albums too), so Spotify saves me a lot of money and a lot of time.

The video content will grow quite rapidly, now that several big archives are donating stuff for use in Wikipedia (like he German Bundesarchiv and the Dutch Nationaal Archief). For now, primararly thousands and thousands of photo's, but it is strange to think that video's will follow soon? Also media outlets like Al Jazeera are distributing material with a cc-license. (cc.aljazeera.net). Wikipedia will be a big player with the video-content soon enough.

Well, you might want to look around then, there a plenty of examples where soldiers do train within a virtual environment. For example, here in the Netherlands the Dutch TNO institution has rebuild an entire virtual village in Afganistan used by soldiers to train team skills. http://www.tno.nl/images/shared/overtno/magazine/tno_mag_3_apr_2009_06_09.pdf

Actually, there are British scientists on board.

Thats why they have also a twitter/hyves/youtube account :-)

http://vprobeagle.hyves.nl/
http://twitter.com/beagleproject
http://www.youtube.com/user/VPROBeagle

And a fan-site:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57984394055

The Dutch and Belgium tax payers (they pay for the public broadcasters VPRO and VRT (and the educational broadcaster Teleac/NOT) who co-host the show) with additional funds from the Dutch and Belgium governments and private sponsors.

Erhmm... that should be: 'Don't care where and how you want to watch or listen to us, as long as you are watching and listening to us'.

It is not obscure! You have to get in mind that the VPRO is one of the large Dutch public broadcasters with lots of airtime on tv and radio. The co-host, VRT is the Belgium public broadcaster. They have a beagle site at http://multiblog.vrt.be/canvasprogrammas/beagle-kaart/ Many public broadcasters here in the Netherlands, endorse the idea of 'Don't care where and how you watch or listen to us, if you are listening to us'. In that adagium, Youtube, facebook, twitter fit very well.

Actually they did. and quite exentsive with that. But as its a Dutch/Belgium cooperation, the site is mostly in Dutch. http://beagle.vpro.nl/ But there is a section in English (and in Spanish and in Portuges) http://beagle.vpro.nl/#/page/item/12/english/

True, you have to be in a certain area. But this can be quite large. When I viewed a demo on the IBC, at least twenty people were inside the 'zone'. All were 'Wowed ' :-)

I refuse sitting in my living room wearing those nasty 3D-glasses. I'll wait untill Philips opens up its WOWvx department again. I've seen this live and my initial reaction was, well, WOW!

Please take into account the possibilty... I know many people who secretly admitted they wanted the internet because of porn. But after seeing a couple of sites, they also discovered many many more. And they got a girlfriend.

Actually we would care. There's no office in the Netherlands where the employees are this clean-cut and well dressed :-)

Of course Europeans see McDonalds as foreign. But the brand is emphasising the American way of life, which is considered positive in many countries.

Second hand? Ebay, Amazon offer loads of second hand books.