You can do lot of interesting stuff with Google Talk like get alert notifications, save bookmarks to delicious, manage web calendars, set reminders, write blogs, and so much more.
Such features can be easily integrated into Google Talk through ‘bots’ which, in simple English, are like virtual friends who are online 24×7 and will always respond with a smile to your questions or requests.
Is there an RSS bot for Google+?
At the same time as mail volume is decreasing, people still want the ability to receive mail at any time and at any address they choose. As a result, the number of individual delivery points increased by 735,779. That is to say, the costs of maintaining the ability to distribute mail are going up, even though the volume of mail (i.e. revenue) is declining. The USPS has massive fixed-infrastructure costs built into its core as a national service committed to serving everyone.
That’s why the decline in mail volume, spurred by the availability of that other point-to-point communications network, the Internet, is an existential crisis. Maybe one of the two big pieces of legislation ham-tying the USPS — the 1970 Postal Service Reorganization Act and the Postal Act of 2006 — will get changed and the immediate crisis for the USPS will abate. But in the long term, the Postal Service has got to deal with its revenues and its costs running in the opposite directions.
The other packet mode end to end network. Postal chess anyone?
Analysis of the costs and benefits of IP protection shows there is a tendency toward overprotection of IP in all our societies, particularly in the areas of copyright and patents.
The analysis also shows the optimal rate of protection differs between countries and that it can differ across time as countries move through different stages of economic development.
The problems of overprotection are particularly acute for technology importing countries, including developing countries.
The analysis shows that for these countries, IP rights that are too strong will detract from innovation rather than promote it.
It’s not a question of protection, it’s how long and how broad that protection should be.
The latest example is the recent debate around usage-based billing. Klinker doesn???t believe it would do anything to alleviate network congestion, and he wishes ISPs would be a little more innovative. ??? ???You should really do congestion-based billing,??? he suggested.???
Usage caps are not a means of managing network capex and opex, but are a pricing ruse to extract revenue and exclude competing services.
Until these factors are recognised, nothing will encourage ISPs to shift from their current local maxima.
I think that with Twine we hit upon a previously unaddressed need for broadly accessible bits of technology that end users can use to solve problems that they themselves care about. The last two decades have shown that connecting virtually anything to a network (of people or things) greatly magnifies its relevance. We see Twine as the first time that essentially anyone can do that for themselves.
We aren???t the only ones to come up with the idea of revealing the BitTorrent habits of copyright advocates. Yesterday, the Dutch blog Geenstijl exposed how someone at the local music royalty collecting agency Buma/Stemra downloaded a copy of the TV-show Entourage and video game Battlefield 3.
In a response Buma/Stemra issued a press release stating that their IP-addresses were spoofed. A very unlikely scenario, but one that will be welcomed by BitTorrent pirates worldwide. In fact, they???d encourage Sony, Universal and Fox to say something similar. After all, if it???s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders.
The cat among the other cats.
For years there has been a concerted effort by telephone and cable company operators to replace the nobody-owns-it Internet conversation with one about ???broadband,??? which is something they own and rent out. The U.S. government has been enlisted in this campaign, as have the rest of us. (I???ve used the term ???broadband??? plenty myself, for example, here.) But I began to get hip what was going on in the Summer of 2010, at a conference where a spokesman for the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) gave a talk about the goodness of broadband without once uttering the word ???Internet.??? Recently the ITU has been further sanitizing this rhetorical body-snatch by talking up broadband as a ???basic human right???.
Framing. All important, and the good Doc exposes it.
powerful corporate copyright interests have taken advantage of the post 9-11 era to obtain the services of Homeland Security to enforce commercial interests.
To be fair they also paid a lot to obtain those services.
Netflix has been given the legal green light to integrate information of customer???s video viewing habits on social networks following the passing of a bill by the US House of Representatives.
The bill, HR 2471, effectively lifts 23 year old restrictions imposed under the Video Privacy Protection Act, which forbids the disclosure of video rental records. Under the new bill, consumers will be able to give a one-time consent to release their rental data.
The proposal still needs to be approved by the US Senate.
Interestingly narrow privacy protection being loosened.
There are so many things about this story that are crazy, it’s difficult to know where to start, so let’s give the most important point first: The US government has effectively admitted that it totally screwed up and falsely seized & censored a non-infringing domain of a popular blog, having falsely claimed that it was taking part in criminal copyright infringement. Then, after trying to hide behind a totally secretive court process with absolutely no due process whatsoever (in fact, not even serving papers on the lawyer for the site or providing timely notifications — or providing any documents at all), for over a year, the government has finally realized it couldn’t hide any more and has given up, and returned the domain name to its original owner. If you ever wanted to understand why ICE’s domain seizures violate the law — and why SOPA and PROTECT IP are almost certainly unconstitutional — look no further than what happened in this case.
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear. Yeah, right.
Hamish MacEwan 