links for 2009-06-21
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ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by "publicly performing" it without a license.
ASCAP's outlandish claim is part of its battle with major mobile carriers (including Verizon and AT&T) over whether ASCAP is owed any money for "public performances" of the musical ringtones sold by the carriers. The carriers point out that the owners of the musical compositions (i.e., songwriters and music publishers) are already paid for each ringtone download, but ASCAP claims that it's owed another royalty for the "public performances" (i.e., ringing in a restaurant) of those same ringtones.
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1. Twitter Is a Tool and Thus Difficult to Censor
shutting down Twitter.com does little to stop the offending Twittering. You’d have to shut down the entire service, which is done occasionally for maintenance.2. Tweets Are Generally Banal, but Watch Out
Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.
3. Buyer Beware
Nothing on Twitter has been verified.
4. Watch Your Back
Some Twitterers may even be trying to trick you.
5. Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge
For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques.
6. Twitter Can Be a Potent Tool for Media Criticism
Just as Twitter can rally protesters against governments, its broadcast ability can rally them quickly and efficiently against news outlets.
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camera shoots 3-megapixel stills, and thus could be commanded to shoot 720p video–it's got more than enough pixels to spare, and the speedier 600MHz processor in the phone should be easily capable of the increased bandwidth required by 720p video. Why has Apple chosen to limit it to VGA resolution? It seems a slightly odd move, given that there are smartphones out there that shoot still imagery at 12-megapixels and can do full HD video.
The answer is a mystery, but we can guess one probable cause. It's the same reason why the 3G S's new processor, which is capable of 833MHz speeds, is choked down to just 600MHz: Battery life.
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