SMH Article: Cutting crime as easy as MP3
Woot. The best bit:
Schools, universities, libraries and other cultural institutions will in the future be free to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes.
Dubious bit:
In a big win for recording artists, the laws will include the removal of the legislative 1 per cent cap on copyright licence fees paid by radio broadcasters for playing sound recordings.
Dubious because I’m really uncertain as to how that’s going to pan out… I’m thinking it’s actually going to further inhibit the scope of the music we hear on commercial radio! Non-commercial radio… well, who knows? Is that a “cultural institution”?
We’ll see how it pans out. I’m now keen on getting an MP3 player/phone that plays MP3s (and has at least 512MB on an SD card, none of this super-tiny-memory stuff you find in phones). Orange stop operations at the beginning of August, I think, so I’ve got until then…
oh get my phone get my phone! it’s got a cool mp3 player and got this tiny tiny 512mb card that’s really cool and you can put lots of stuff and yea its REALLY COOL. lol i’ll show you my phone for inspection next time i see you
Orange stop operations? Explain?
Mmmm maybe. Don’t you have a Moto SLVR/L7? I’m not a fan of the keys on those (or on the Razr, but I wouldn’t even consider that, mostly coz I’m an elitist and everyone has one/everyone who has bought a new phone recently has got that one). Plus the “tiny tiny” bit about the 512MB card annoys me… I’ve already got several SD cards, why can’t I use them? It’s ridiculous the way phone manufacturers try and fragment the market, knowing they can temporarily establish a monopoly on memory distribution. Grrrr.
*ahem*
So yeah. Moto phones look cool and are slim (which is always nice), I just don’t know if I could use the keypad for more than a month without getting, erm, phone-rage and defenestrating it (if you don’t know what that is, look up the word… it’s so cool!! Mostly used RE: people, but whatever).
I tend to go to extremes with technology, so I’ll either go for something that JUST does SMS+phone call kinda stuff (maybe receiving MMS, but no camera) or go after a PDA-phone that has WiFi, Bluetooth, a decent-ish camera, can take a keyboard attachment, accepts SD cards/has a PCMCIA port, and end up spending call costs + $50/month for Internet (Vodafone have a good plan for that).
The former option is infinitely more sensible, and I can’t justify the latter at all unless someone else were paying for it/I had a far greater ‘need’ for that at a professional level than I do at present. So I’ll probably end up buying an average-ish second-hand phone off someone. Or maybe, if I can find one cheap, one that takes SD cards/comes with minimum 512MB of memory and plays MP3s. Mind you I don’t buy enough new music often enough to actually an MP3 player I don’t think. It’s just nice that I would be able to. If only I hadn’t lost my last one… ah well.
Something will be sorted out before then, I suppose. We’ll see.
Budd: Orange = now 3 (even though both have always been Hutchinson, stupid divergent brands/separate network crap). Orange = CDMA. 3 = Proprietary 3G crap-ass network with retarded SIM cards and crappy brick phones. Orange consolidation = migration of existing customers onto 3. Me = Orange customer who isn’t bound by contract. Vodafone = cool network (GSM+3G) I’m going to wind up on at the minute.
Ah. Indeed.
but the keypad on my phone is different to the razr! i distinctly noticed that. like the lines are drawn differently. and the keypad is actually quite usuable. anyway. i advise that if you want to get a new phone you go to hk. coz like, you get so much free stuff with the phone. SO MUCH. i got: free 512MB card, extra battery, thing where you can charge the battery by itself without it being in the phone, two mobile chargers, head phones, bluetooth thing that you attach to your ear and makes you like business-like, a screen protector, a neck string thing, a leader case, this cool little device where you insert the memory card in and then insert it into other stuff (coz the card is too small to be inserted in itself) AND a snoopy blanket. c’mon, you know you want the snoopy blanket.
Mmm… well I just bought one so too late :P $300, smart/PDA phone. Cradle (PC dock) will charge + has AC adapter, cradle also can charge second battery whilst there’s already a phone in it apparently (so I’m probably going to fork out for a second battery, just for a little extra life), it comes with Bluetooth earpiece AND does 802.11b wireless networking (i.e. Internet on phone for free whenever I’m near an access point) and it uses normal SD cards, so I’ve already got 1.25GB of memory for that here.
Having said all that… no Snoopy blanket. You win. :P