Daily Archives: May 3, 2006

Piracy Cost Studios $6 Billion in ’05, Study Says

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Los Angeles Times report…

Hollywood’s major studios lost $6.1 billion to film theft in 2005, according to a Motion Picture Assn. of America study.The global survey of piracy, which examined how much revenue the studios lost through bootleg movies and illegal Internet downloads, found that the bulk of theft — about $4.8 billion — occurred internationally, with China, Russia and Mexico the worst offenders.

Of the $6.1 billion, $3.8 billion was lost to bootlegging and illegal copying, while Internet piracy cost the industry $2.3 billion, according to the study. Among the more notorious examples occurred last year when an illegal copy of “Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith” appeared on the Internet before its big-screen premiere.The study by LEK Consulting is the first of its kind commissioned by the MPAA, whose previous surveys of the problem did not encompass Internet piracy.

So the studios’ legal campaigns are really working, then.

Teflon Tony

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Nice blog entry by the BBC’s Political Editor, Nick Robinson…

Today Tony Blair claimed that the deportation of foreign prisoners was not a problem his government had created – but one that they were solving. (“Oh that’s alright then” I hear you cry). Having airily dismissed his failure to implement his old policy, he turned to the future and pledged to introduce a new one. A change of the law will mean that the working assumption will be that all foreign criminals will be deported whatever their crime rather than – as now – merely considered for deportation if their sentence is longer.

Just like Margaret Thatcher before him, Tony Blair has the ability to ask what on earth the government is up to – like a caller to a radio phone-in – and then promise to sort it out…

Sun will rise tomorrow, market researchers predict

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Thanks to Good Morning Silicon Valley…

A research note released this week from Gartner predicts that Microsoft will miss its end-of-year ship date for Windows Vista. “Microsoft’s track record is clear; it consistently misses target dates for major operating system releases,” the firm wrote. “We don’t expect broad availability of Windows Vista until at least 2Q07, which is nine to 12 months after Beta 2.” According to Gartner, Microsoft will likely need at least nine months to clean up and fix bugs found in Vista after the Beta 2 release. Now, historically Microsoft has missed the ship date of most every OS it’s produced, so it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to intuit that it may miss Vista’s latest ship date as well, especially since it’s been slipping almost since the day it was set.

Microsoft says:

“We respectfully disagree with Gartner’s views around timing of the final delivery of Windows Vista,” a Microsoft spokesman told CNET News. “We remain on track to deliver Windows Vista Beta 2 in the second quarter and to deliver the final product to volume-license customers in November 2006 and to other businesses and consumers in January 2007.”

So now you know. Or not, as the case may be.

Get a Mac

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Witty series of short movies explaining various reasons for buying an Apple Mac. Not recommended for Windows users unless they’ve been retrofitted with a sense of humour. The movies are clearly inspired by Umberto Eco’s celebrated essay arguing that the PC was a Protestant machine whereas the Mac was undoubtedly a Catholic one.

Thanks to Gerard for the link.

Spinwatch

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Here’s a really good idea — a website that publishes details of the organisations lobbying for a particular change in public policy — in this case nuclear power.

The Nuclear Spin website is designed to help people find out more about the key pro-nuclear advocates in the UK who are pushing for a resumption of nuclear power. It documents some of the public relations tactics being used by the industry to fool the public into believing that Britain’s future is nuclear.

We need to do one for the copyright thugs.

Bush’s hydrogen fantasies: “forever far off”

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From a Technology Review interview with Ernest J. Moniz, an MIT physicist and former Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy…

Tech Review: President Bush has been talking a lot about hydrogen. Is the hydrogen economy the answer?

Moniz: There are many here on campus who have written about it — John Deutch had a Science paper about it and John Heywood has testified to the Congress about it and has written several reports with colleagues. The hydrogen transportation economy looks to us to be very, very challenging, very far off. And “very far off” could mean: forever far off. Given the cost barriers that must be overcome with fuel cells, the challenges for storing hydrogen onboard, and the infrastructure problems for delivering hydrogen — it makes one wonder whether alternative technologies, which require far less disruption to the infrastructure and are far less of a cost challenge, but are highly efficient, don’t essentially accomplish the same goal…

The World Cup script

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The current hysteria about the broken metatarsal of Wayne Rooney (see helpful illustration above) reminds one that world cup hysteria in the British media is running true to form. It goes like this:

  • First comes the (cruel and unnatural) encouragement of hopes that England might actually win the cup.
  • Next follows the crushing disappointment of the team’s plucky but abysmal performance in the actual tournament.
  • Then comes the vicious aftermath in which the tabloids turn on the architects of the disaster, i.e. managers, players, officials — in short, anyone but themselves.

    • The one thing missing from the time-honoured script is likely to be English football hooligans, who were once world champions at their sport, but are now apparently eclipsed by Polish thugs. Sigh. And to think that this country once had an Empire on which the sun never set.

    I think you turn left after Afghanistan

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    WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Most American young people can’t find Iraq on a map, even though U.S. troops have been there for more than three years, according to a new geographic literacy study released on Tuesday.

    Fewer than 4 in 10 Americans aged 18-24 in a survey could place Iraq on an unlabeled map of the Middle East, a study conducted for National Geographic found. Only about one-quarter of respondents could find Iran and Israel on the same map.

    Sixty-nine percent of young people picked out China on a map of Asia, but only about half could find India and Japan and only 12 percent correctly located Afghanistan.

    [Link] via Truthdig.

    Lunatics in charge of asylum

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    One thing mysteriously missing from the discussion about the managerial chaos at the Home Office is the fact that this is the organisation which is going to oversee (and ensure the security of) ID cards.