Yet another Minister of Fucking Culture.

Christine Albanel (Minister of culture of France) and Josee Verner (Heritage minister of Canada).

What people to reg?

pffft

Some people actually do.
When you get several “Reader’s Write” posts, it can sometimes become confusing trying to determine how many actual viewpoints are being voiced.

Very well said BTW.
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“Either you’re a “dumb pipe” with zero liability that’s required to keep all things moving, or you’re a corporate-ass-kissing packet-sniffing control freak who has decided to toss away your “common carrier” status, thereby making you liable for everything.”.
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shud we care?

Why not? It would follow the exact same reasoning.

This is also a demonstration of why I keep saying that providers shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways…
Either you’re a “dumb pipe” with zero liability that’s required to keep all things moving, or you’re a corporate-ass-kissing packet-sniffing control freak who has decided to toss away your “common carrier” status, thereby making you liable for everything.

Well I like this.

Since the ISP’s are putting in a P2Ptax in Canada and profiting off of anyone who uses P2P or downloads, then it makes sense that users not be held liable, but rather only the executives who are profiting off of this. Bell, Cogeco, Rogers, videotron and anyone else who uses UBB with such low caps.

I say bring this to Canada.

Will ISPs also be liable for people distributing kiddie porn or for swapping conspiracy plans for another terrorist bombing?

Thank god I don’t live in Australia.

Let’s also ignore the fact that — absent so-called “power-users” — a lot of people don’t even know what brand their phone is, and/or just take whatever their carrier provides them (The “Free phone” with contract phenomenon.)

Now, at least in the U.S., the tendency has been for carriers to intentionally cripple most of their devices (so that people had to “buy” ringtones from the carrier instead of being able to import their own etc.) So it’s not particularly suprising that many carriers would opt for phones with a smaller feature-set. Prime example of this is something called “The Jitterbug”, specifically designed for people who want cellphones to be like PHONES, instead of the “smartphones” with as much processing power as your average laptop of a few years ago.
The only way to REALLY know whether “the global economic downturn” was having an effect (and what KIND) would be for someone to do an across-the-board study of all brands, with sales figures broken down by feature-set (so you wouldn’t be able to lump high-end “smartphones” and “Jitterbugs” together into the same statistic, since they’re actually optimized for very different demographics.)

Basic rule of thumb: after your market penetration is “100 percent”, your sales are GOING to slow down. It’s been known for years that there’s a very predictable pattern: a relatively-small “early adopter” clique followed by a mass explosion, and then a fairly-steady trend after the product becomes “mature”.

Well, cellphones and other “mobile devices” became ubiquitous at least three years ago, so trying to blame the “mature” phase of product development on “economic slowdow” is kinda shifty, to me.

Plus, I’d really love to know who these “analysts” predicting the sales-figures were. I’m always suspicious of blurbs containing allusions to “experts” or “a study” or suchlike, myself. Read the article on “Weasel words”, and you’ll definitely learn something.

The free publicity for the “suffering” Nokia corporation won’t hurt their sales figures any, either….