People who illegally share music files online are also big spenders on legal music downloads, research suggests.
Digital music research firm The Leading Question found that they spent four and a half times more on paid-for music downloads than average fans.
Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Downloading 'myths' challenged

Acidus wrote:

President Bush has created a new senior level position to fight global piracy and counterfeiting that cost American companies billions of dollars in lost sales each year, Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said on Friday.

Calling "piracy" lost sales is really misleading because you count "pirates" as potential customers. First, the language "Pirate" is inaccurate. "Hobo" would be a more accurate analogy. A Hobo might bum a ride but never buy a ticket. This makes a Hobo a non-customer. A Pirate on the other hand, steals the actual potential for something to make a sale. Does a Hobo? No... A Hobo takes up unsold space on a train. In other words, while there is an unfair product distribution, this does not impede the rightful owner from selling more product. An IP Hobo in some ways encourages other potential sales. Most artistic tastes rub off by group contact, so for every Hobo'd copy has a good chance of selling a real copy and widening an audience that otherwise would not have known about a product. Video rental stores and Libraries purchase at least one official copy of an IP product. IP Hobos are free to borrow these copies and absorb their content. There isn't much of a difference between this type of distribution, and P2P methods. There are the added benefits that a single copy can be passed seamlessly along to the next reader/viewer/listener without the need to wait for the first person to finish (which is ideal for an archive of information). In a Library model, the person returns the media borrowed, but in this case is it even important? Most of these people aren't reading the media over and over again, the work simply exists as a part of the library.

What's the difference between a song you remember, and a song on your computer? A computer might have a somewhat better copy, but I think the crucial difference comes down to means of access. You can hum the song, its not quite the same as hitting play, however it is a means of access and distribution of a copy-written work. You hum the song, before you know it, your friend is humming the song, and his friends, and their friends and so on. Are these people thieves? Or is the fact that "Humming" is a degraded copy make a difference? Hmm... Lets say one person buys a CD and his friends hear the content while in this persons car... Did they purchase the rights to hear this music? Did this person have the right to expose this material? Should these things come with memory erase pills, so that no one remembers "content," but instead only remember liking or disliking it so you can buy an official licensed edition? Lets say you hum the contents of an album, and release a torrent file of the humming? Is that any different then releasing a shitty recording of the actual music in a torrent file? Is the shitty recording in any way less of an IP violation then a higher quality release? How... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: The Other shoe: The Anti-piracy czar

TOKYO - At last, a way to end squabbles over which TV channel to watch — without buying a second set. Sharp Corp. has developed a liquid-crystal display that shows totally different images to people viewing the screen from the left and the right.

Sharp Develops 'Two-Way Viewing-Angle' LCD - Yahoo! News

Now this is a truly new application of a keyboard, which I am sure will be rather hellishly expensive, but will probably not have any problem finding people to buy it judging from how much some fools are willing to pay for the reduced-size "Happy Hacker" keyboard--particularly since they willingly pay even more for the version where no one bothered to silkscreen labels onto the keys.

I give it a whole three months of this thing on the market before someone codes up a Drempels-style hack to make the keys change color and so on while the keyboard is being used. The possibilities are damn near endless.

Pimp.

This man deserves a patent with a large sack of money pinned to it.

Decius Wrote:

Equipped with a camera and sensors, the Guardrobo D1, developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co, is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble.

Intruder Alert!

DO NOT MOVE! DO NOT MOVE! EXTERMINATE!!!

DigitalCamera@101reviews - Japanese Robot Guards to Patrol Shops And Offices

Michael Dell would like to license Mac OS X and ship it with future PC products, the Dell founder and chairman has revealed.

Dell 'happy' to ship Mac OS X-based PCs | The Register

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I foudn this today. Its a nifty game where you try to click a moving object. At first glance it looks like a fun game some teenager made to learn Flash. It is actually javascript!

ClickRed - Insane Javascript

] Solipsis is a pure peer-to-peer system for a massively
] shared virtual world. There is no server at all: it only
] relies on end-users' machines.
]
] The shared virtual worlds of nowadays MMORPG strongly
] rely on privately owned servers. These servers are an
] expensive bottleneck that limits their scalability. In
] addition, these servers bound the freedom of the virtual
] world inhabitants and the imagination of the
] world-builders and developers. Solipsis solves these
] problems with a free and open-source system.
]
] Solipsis is a public virtual territory. The world is
] initially empty and only users will fill it by creating
] and running entities. No pre-existing cities, habitants
] nor scenario to respect...
]
] Solipsis is open-source, so everybody can enhance the
] protocols and the algorithms. Moreover, the system
] architecture clearly separates the different tasks, so
] that peer-to-peer hackers as well as multimedia geeks can
] find here a good place to have fun !
]
] The best approximation of what could be Solipsis in a
] near future may be Neal Stephenson's Metaverse.

Interesting.

Development is being lead by France Telecom's R&D division.

Solipsis: A peer-to-peer system for a massively multi-participant virtual world

] This corporation from the picture where you place on and
] the like the desk horizontally, developed the new display
] technology which makes three-dimensional image indicate.
] This display is visible, opening is sent being something
] which in for the education exhibition and the arcade
] game, when from the front it disdains in slanted
] direction, in order image several cm to come up even with
] the naked eye making use of the special glasses.
] In the future, combining with touch panel the performance
] and the like which is operated concerning the picture is
] added, toward commercialization aims within 2 years.
]
] Naked eye three-dimensional display delivering the image
] which barely slips in both eyes, being something which
] makes the 3-D feel, is formed by the software which
] creates the image which responds to the angle which you
] see as the display panel which controls the travelling
] direction of light with the film which arranges the
] minute lens.

Cool.

Toshiba: Press release (2005.4.15)