June 2009 Archives

The Berner Convention (originally 1886, latest revision 1979) is the mother of international copyright law.  An international treaty  "For the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works". The treaty automatically assigns copyright to an author for his/hers lifetime plus 50 years. The right is a monopoly and extends to almost any form of publication. As the revision date shows it does make some allowances for broadcasting audio and TV (wireline/cable, terrestrial or satellite) but not explicitly for the Internet, as it was not yet invented in 1979.  

In practice a body of (case) law has been formed  (and still is being formed: for example the Cablevision DVR-on-the-net in the USA) to accommodate both the broadcasting and the Internet environment.

There are some interesting differences: a cable company delivering linear analog or digital TV (DVB or some other encoding method) is seen as the publisher of copyrighted material and has to get permission from the authors (meaning: has to pay them). The same applies for walled garden IP-TV offerings by telco's. But if the same customer uses the broadband connection of the same cable company or telco and views a video over the Internet, the law does not regard these companies as the publisher. The owner of the website where one can find the video is seen as the publisher of copyrighted material and has to get permission of the authors.

Why? Copyright-lawyers have explained that the difference is the concept of "Common Carriage". The Internet access provider has no relationship with and does not interfere with the content of the messages which he transports. Message and content agnostic. In that case (and only in that case) the company which transports content to and from your home is not held responsible and therefore is not regarded as a publisher of copyrighted material.

Enter Network Neutrality. Wouldn't it be a very nice twist if we use the above mentioned definition, the existing body of (case) law and its consequences as the basis for Net Neutrality? The threat would be: if you mess around with IP-traffic you are in danger of losing the "Common Carriage" status, you risk to be regarded as a publisher of copyrighted material with all consequences attached to that status. You would become responsible and liable if you mess with traffic.

As I am not a lawyer I might have missed something, it might not cover everything (VOIP traffic for instance), but at the least it would cover a large part of the Internet. The beauty with this approach is that nobody will try to change existing copyright case law. 

Maybe......

There are various ways to look at problems with greenhouse gases. The livestock-sectoris produces 37% of all human-induced methane. You can try to convince people to eat less meat, but another possibility is putting the cows on a diet. Stonyfield farmes put 74 cows on a diet of less corn and soy based feeds and more flaxseed and alphalpha which are closer to the spring grasses that cows naturally eat.

" The cows have been on this Green Mountain diet since January of this year and they are already reporting positive results.  As of mid May, the farmers are reporting an average reduction in the cows' methane emissions of 12% and reductions as high as 18%.  They have also found that the new diet not only inclreases milk production, the milk has higher concentrations of Omega-3 fatty acids (good) and lower concentrations of saturated fat (bad)."


Link: Green Upgrader

Classical music is one of the most demanding performances for audiovisual encoding and decoding. Wide dynamic range, listeners with trained ears, many benchmarks. The highest barrier for using the Internet to show performances.

Small British company RiverSimple demonstrated the prototype for a two-seated hydrogen powered vehicle that might start production in 2013. What I like is that they plan not to sell it, but to lease it for about $315 per month, including fuel. What might be blocking them is that they are backed by Sebastian Piech of Porsche-fame.

Create your own bicycle lane in the dark: project it on the street with LightLane.

Newsweek brings us the truth behind battery life claims. We all know that we never get the manufacturer's claim but now I finally understand why. As Newsweek brings it: "Imagine if automakers got together and started measuring the gas mileage of new cars with a cool test of their own making--one in which the cars were rolling downhill with their engines idling. Suddenly you'd have some pretty amazing claims: Why, that three-ton SUV gets 300 miles per gallon! This subcompact gets 500! In tiny print at the bottom of the window sticker you'd find a disclaimer saying that, well, um, you know, your mileage may vary."

This is because battery-life numbers are based on a benchmark test called MobileMark 2007 (MM07). The test was created by a consortium called BAPCo (Business Application Performance Corp.), whose members are--you guessed it--computer makers and other tech companies. Laptops score big numbers because they're tested with screens dimmed to 20 to 30 percent of full brightness, the Wi-Fi turned off and the main processor chip running at 7.5 percent of capacity--just like those cars idling downhill.

But there is some light at the end of the tunnel. There is discussion on a new benchmark, which would state Active Time and Resting Time. A bit like mobile phones do with talking time and standby-time. AMD is promoting this and some laptop makers are seriously considering it. And they better do, because the alternatives are government interruption or a class-action lawsuit..." For now, count 50% of the battery time the manufacturers claim and you have a good real-life estimate.

A few days ago New Mexico started with the first purpose-built commercial Spaceport, called Spaceport America. The Spaceport will operate like an airport. Virgin Galactic and other companies will use it as a base for their commercial spaceflights.

They claim: "Today's groundbreaking initiates construction on a cutting-edge, 110,000-plus square footfacility using cost-effective, energy-efficient green building practices. In accordance with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson's executive order 2006-001 for state buildings, Spaceport America's terminal hangar facility will be built to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED rating system. Extensive use of sustainable and clean energy technology throughout the design will ensure that the spaceport will set the standard for environmentally sound design for similar structures in the future. From earth-tubes that will pre-condition the air to reduce HVAC costs by 50-70% to solar thermal panels on the roof for hot water to the embedded in-floor loop system, Spaceport America is both unique and iconic in terms of visual and environmental design."

Virgin Galactic is looking into clean fuel and trying to burn as little fuel as possible. The spaceport should be ready in 2010/2011. It will be interesting to see if and how new technology coming from this research can benefit other means of transportation and the use of renewable energy.

 

As our desire to get hyperconnected is insatiable, airlines (at least in the USA) are responding fast.  

While rather naieve politicians in the Netherlands blindly follow propaganda of the media industry about file-sharing, while the UK is no different, some researchers from Harvard Univiversity have tackled the real hard question: does file-sharing stifle content creation?

The authors construct a bit of a causal chain between file sharing and the intent of copyright law to foster creative works. First, you'd need to know that file sharing was harming music sales, and that the music industry wasn't finding alternative ways of generating income. Then you'd need to show that the loss of income provided a disincentive to musical creativity.

The authors show that the first two arguments do not hold: the loss of some revenue of direct sales is offsett by higher fees for concert tickets.

If the first two links in the chain are tenuous, the last one pretty much gets demolished. There's essentially no indication that the more challenging economics are slowing down creative content production. In the five years prior to 2007, film production is up 30 percent, album releases have doubled, and book releases are up by two-thirds.

Although the paper could be improved and is not yet been scrutinized by the community, it is al least a solid evidence based approach to the issue. Something which cannot be said for most others.

One of the mantra's of (telecom) competition authorities is that competition will lower prices and improve services.

Text messaging used to be done by sending morse-code signals. Terribly outdated, but surprisingly fast and efficient.
Morse Code-Leno - Click here for more home videos

Is it a car, is it a motorcycle? Nowadays you see more and more hybrid designs, with 3 and 4 wheels. Like the Piaggio MP3, the Carver, the T-rex, the Aptera and many others (see a list of 3 wheelers over here).

I just learned of a great site. Both useful and fun to watch. Howcast, around 100,000 video's of HowTo stuff. Ranging from How To Tie a Tie to How To Reform a Spoiled Brat to the brilliant How To Survice a Bear Attack. And to confirm Herman's previous post: they have a very popular i-Phone app. Great for killing a few minutes waiting for someone...

One of our favorite bloggers (James Enck) points to a telling graph in a presentation by Kenneth Karlberg of TeliaSonera.

Streetcar, the UK's largest pay-as-you-go-car-sharing-club, has announced that it will offer members a specially adapted Toyota Prius. It can be expected that this is a success, since members of a car-sharing-club in general care about the environment. While a trial at first, Streetcar has announced to increas the number of electric cars if demand will rise. The idea of a car-sharing-club going electric for small distances in the city seems so simple to me that in my opinion it is bound to be a success. Because this way you can have the best of both worlds: an electric car for small distances and a conventionally powered car for larger distances. And at rates from 5,95 pounds per hour you can't call it expensive...

Source: Gas2.0

 

It is amazing to follow the smart use of Twitter and its API's, Facebook en Flickr by protesting Iranians today. Bypassing the blockade of professionals journalists, using the tools the Chinese protesters did not have 10 years ago.

Just wait till they grow up....

Twide a year the sun sets in a spectacular way in Manhattan: almost a third millenium Stonehenge. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, identified the cosmic event over a decade ago and coined it Manhattanhenge. 

One of my favourite blogs is Evolving Excellence, dedicated to Lean Thinking in production and services. Outspoken, opiniated but well researched, practical.

"Conceptually, the impact of offshoring is more pronounced in manufacturing measures than in business sector measures, provided the domestic manufacturer is purchasing the offshored goods or services as inputs. ... If a domestic computer manufacturer switches from domestic to foreign suppliers of intermediate parts such as memory chips or call center services, real manufacturing sectoral output is unchanged because the real value of the computer is unchanged. Because U.S. jobs are lost (all other things unchanged), labor productivity will rise. If the U.S. manufacturer switches most of its production to off-shore facilities, labor productivity might rise substantially." 

" Email is the cockroach of the Internet. The place is infested and the buggers are extremely resistant to any attack. We will probably just have to learn to live with it and try to shift to more meaningfull methods of conversation".

A couple of years ago some people strongly believed aliens created them. Of course it turned out to be humans who thought it was funny. And then they dissapeared. But now they are back! Crop circles, better than they were before. The Guardian shows some fine examples. And presents a Crop Circle How-To:

The newely launched Microsoft search engine Bing surpassed Yahoo in just a week to take the second spot in the US search engine ranking. This follows from StatCounter analysis of the top 5 search engines in the US from May 29 to Jun 4, 2009. This will not be good news for Yahoo!, which is in big trouble since its takeover talks with Microsoft failed. But what's more important, it loos like Bing took some traffic away from Google. And Bing is not the only new kid on the search engine block. Wolfram's Alpha search engine claims not to be a competitor to Google, but to provide a different kind of search. But in reality, of course, they all try to capture some of the big dollar advertising market. Alpha claims that their aim is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Not a bad objective... For now it's not a very shocking result although a search on e.g. 'population netherlands' gives you a glimpse of what might be in the future. Direct reliable results that are to the point and fun. Like combining google and wikipedia.

 

This cute little trilobot is entirely solar-powered and autonomous in aquiring its own energy. Dan Roe made it as a kinetic art object. I like art moving on solar power. Maybe it can join the wind driven Strandbeesten designed by Theo Jansen. Let them muddle along together!

Watch the little trilobot go

Via Engadget

One of the taskforces of the IEA (International Energy Agency) is taskforce 33: Thermal Gasification of Biomass, sharing the knowhow on how to build large scale biomass gasification factories. Gasification has the potential to generate Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) from biomass: it even makes sense to import biomass.

Forecasting the future is notoriously difficult. As this short clip dated 1967 proves.