“The new rules issued by the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board earlier this year prescribe rate hikes of 0.08 cent per song per listener retroactive to 2006. They would also climb to 0.19 cent per song by 2010.” [cnet]

The fees are high enough that many small players (where small==independent) will be forced to shut down. The irony, of course, is that broadcast radio continues to pay no fees at all (and to not play the songs I want to hear, which might be why they get the free ride.)

For more on the issue, see:

• Shaken Internet Radio Stations Face Specter of New Fees Sunday (Via washingtonpost.com.)
• D-Day Sunday For Internet Radio As Court Rejects Royalties Appeal (Via TechCrunch.com.)
• Court declines to postpone Internet radio royalty hike (Via ars technica)
• Court rejects Webcasters’plea for relief (Via cnet.)

And of course, the blog post that almost saved the day:

• Online Radio Is Saved; SoundExchange Will Not Enforce New Royalty Rates on Sunday (Via wired.com)

From the post:

“Local.com saw its stock price rise 52% today after it was awarded patent number 7,200,413 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. According to the text of the patent, it covers what they term “Enhanced Directory Assistance”, which will deliver keyword specific ad referrals based on user input via operator, SMS, WAP, or voice.

This is in addition to their recently granted patent number 7,231,405, which covers crawling the web and geocoding location based content.”

That second bit is even more troubling, since it could impact anyone crawling web pages for addresses. The unfortunate thing is that we’re just starting to see sites doing interesting things with scraping and geocoding — and many of the possibilities are actually quite helpful. For example, sites like Zillow already scrape property addresses from local tax records and plot real estate prices on an interactive map… Chicago Crime plots scraped crime reports… Heck, anything that scrapes content with an address for use in plotting on a map would conflict with this patent.

If the idea of locking down automated crawling and geocoding isn’t enough to raise concern, check of these listings of mapping-related concepts that may also end up off-limits if the patent race continues:

• Google Local Search Glossary
• Microsoft Virtual Earth and Local Search Patent Applications

(Via:

• Newest Mars Rover packs heat
• NASA’s next Mars rover is a laser-equipped monster
• Future NASA Rover Will Scare Aliens with Rock-crushing Lasers

)

For more, see:

• Today is America’s wiretap the Internet day (Via BoingBoing)
• Reminder: Monday is Wiretap the Internet Day (Via Wired)

Despite the violent fire, most of the crew and passengers survived. Of the 36 passengers and 61 crew, 13 passengers and 22 crew died. Also killed was one member of the ground crew, Navy Linesman Allen Hagaman. Most deaths did not arise from the fire but were suffered by those who leapt from the burning ship. (The lighter-than-air fire burned overhead.) Those passengers who rode the ship on its descent to the ground survived. (Via Wikipedia.)

Its interesting how counter-intuitive it is that riding a burning ship to the ground would be safer. Although perhaps people have learned that lesson. The recent explosion in public mockery of the AACS decryption keys certainly hasn’t deterred the HD-DVD crowd from hanging on to a technology that’s going down in flames. Calling it a “lost cause” isn’t close to capturing the humor in this statement:

Michael Ayers, the chairman of the AACS-LA … vows to use technical and legal means to shut down the 802,000+ websites that have reproduced the key. (Via BoingBoing, “AACS vows to fight people who publish the key“.)

Although perhaps the difference is that people like airships… and no one likes DRM.

I was hoping to start today by posting a few pictures of our brand-new Optaros office in downtown Austin. Today was to be our first day in the new space. Unfortunately, downtown Austin is closed today, after authorities found a number (possibly dozens) of dead birds along Congress Ave (the street the office is on), which happens to be right in front of the State Capitol building. With the legislative session scheduled to begin tomorrow, the authorities have taken an extra-paranoid view on the situation (which is fine by me.)

The State called in the police, fire department, and the 6th Civil Support Team (WMD) a “Texas National Guard unit, created in 1999 to respond to terrorist incidents involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, as well as other disasters and catastrophic events, both natural and man made.”

As of 10:45am, the local paper (The Statesman) and news sites have no updates.

For more:

• Dead birds shut down Congress Avenue
• Health Dept.: No Public Health Threat Despite Large Number Of Dead Birds
• KXAN Photo Gallery: Dead Birds Shut Down Congress Avenue

–
[Update: 11:15am]
The news makes it to MSNBC, which reports that the dead bird count is more like 60! Downtown Austin shut down after bird deaths

Optaros is an “international consulting and systems integration firm” specializing in “Next Generation Internet” development, with a strong focus on leveraging (and participating in) Open Source software. That last bit was particularly import for me, and thankfully, the Open Source and Agile Development memes run strong in the company. In fact, the culture of the company is probably the number one reason I decided to join, though it doesn’t hurt that I’ve worked with some of these folks before (and was happy to be working with them again.)

I hoped up to Boston for my first few days, which was warmer or colder then Texas, depending on who you ask. The difference, of course, is that Boston had snow Monday morning, which was a welcome novelty for me. My time in Boston was spent getting to know people, getting plugged-in to the company, and wiping my new laptop to install linux (Ubuntu Edgy, to be specific, which is what I run at home on my non-OS X machines.)

It’s an exciting change, and hopefully I’ll be able to share more details once I’ve had a few more weeks to get settled in.

“The theory is that games teach skills that employers want: analytical thinking, team building, multitasking and problem-solving under duress.”

What is a surprise though, is to hear that there are still people who are skeptical about using games for education. I mean, where would my mad dance floor skillz be without Dance Dance Revolution? Ok, bad example.

Looking back though, I fondly remember going to my elementary school library to play typing tutors and Oregon Trail (which taught us the value of 4×4 vehicles.) But past elementary school, educational games went away. At home, I was slingin’LOGO and playing Zork, but my in-school computer use evolved into using spreadsheets and, eventually, programming Pascal.

The article does mention one important fact though:

“The gaming industry has already figured out that educational games don’t make money in the consumer marketplace. The new approach would instead market them directly to schools.”

This is key. You definitely don’t want some “education council” designing the games — they’re going to suck. You need professional game designers. And if you can organize enough of our tax dollars into funding such development, then you give the gaming industry a reason to take the educational market more seriously.

The Dabble DB blog has more to say on the issue:

“…when it comes to managing data, [snip] other web-based spreadsheets [are] only solving half of the collaboration problem. [They let] everybody access and edit the same data over the web, and that’s an important improvement over the email-the-Excel-file-around strategy many groups are stuck with. But it also forces everybody to look at that data in exactly the same way.”

The blogger, Scott Byer, is explaining why Adobe isn’t going to release a MacIntel version of CS2 — the summary being that transitioning their entire development over to XCode wasn’t feasible for CS2. It’s what Adobe’s Mac customers need to hear (that there’s a significant technical hurdle which didn’t make sense for a product currently in the market), but it’s not the kind of thing that a press release can explain. In other words, it’s important information, but without bloggers, there’s no clear channel for how to communicate this stuff.

It’s also of note that the comments list (the conversation) stretches far beyond the length of the original post. The customer feedback is mixed — ranging from “You guys suck, I spent $1000 on this software!”, to “Yeah, I understand the challenge first hand. Thanks for the explanation.”

I chatted with Mr. Feller on the phone a couple weeks ago while he was prepping the article. I wasn’t given the chance to review it, so I’ll post my comments here since the article didn’t sit well with me.

Paragraph 1: “Nokia released the source code for its Python for S60 mobile phone platform [...] in hopes of open source software developers creating new applications for it.” That’s not really how I would put it. Sure, the motivation for releasing PyS60 originally was to let other people play with it, but it didn’t need to be open for that.

Paragraph 3: I’m not sure what a “custom library for mobile-specific functionality” actually refers to. I would say that there are a number of custom libraries for mobile-specific functionality, such as sending and receiving SMS, taking pictures, using Bluetooth and GPRS connectivity, etc. Furthermore, the port includes a custom module for utilizing the native GUI.

Paragraph 4: This comes from a question about application portability, as in, whether Python applications written for PyS60 will run elsewhere. The point here was that portability has been a goal, and in most areas it is working; However, not all of the Python Standard Library is included in the PyS60 release (a decision made to control the installed footprint), and not all of the standard library modules are currently compatible. (Not to say that those modules couldn’t be made to work in the future.) Furthermore, just as Nokia has platform-specific modules, so do other platforms, and if you’re using those modules your code won’t be portable.

Paragraph 5: The short summary: The PyS60 team is still using the Forum Nokia Discussion Boards for the project, and the opensource.nokia.com site is being used to describe it. The project description may or may not move to the SourceForge site — those details are still being worked out.

Paragraph 7: Python has plenty of openness without Nokia’s participation, and I don’t expect “more openness” in the industry from this one event. However, I do hope that other device manufacturers looking at dynamic languages for their devices will consider Python and will consider collaborating on common API’s for mobile functionality to encourage portability. By being open, Nokia is demonstrating the intention to collaborate and to support community-defined standards.

Paragraph 11: Please bear in mind that “intention” and “reality” aren’t the same just yet. This has been stated before, but currently, the open source (1.3.1) release is a snapshot of the project as of Q4’05, and the project has seen continued development internally to ensure compatibility with the next version of Symbian. The ultimate goal is to use a single, open development environment, but it’s going to take baby steps to get there.

Paragraph 12: I’m not really sure where to begin with that one. It has quotes, so I guess I said that… just doesn’t sound like me. Anyway… the points here are: (1) I generally don’t see people noticing this, but Nokia is a huge supporter of open standards, and (2), I don’t know what other licensee’s of S60 “see”, but with PyS60 being open, they certainly have an opportunity to utilize the runtime in their own devices and to add their own device-specific functionality.

Final paragraph… Wow. So here’s the thing — PyS60 doesn’t actually add any new functionality to S60, it just exposes it via a language that is generally seen as more approachable and productive. It’s not going to change the mobile phone ecosystem and shake the industry just yet; And it doesn’t make your phone “more useful”, per say. If you’re the kind of person who likes to hack code and play with your electronic toys, then sure, there’s a chance that having a Python terminal on your phone will make you enjoy it more, but this is really about software development and demonstrating the maturity and capabilities of modern handsets. The S60 platform was already usable and open — that’s why the Python port was even possible.