Does the us government record phone calls or is that simply a fabrication? A number of people are convinced that government agencies are listening in to your calls, but if you think about the data, it doesn’t make much logic that an individual human being might be taking note of just about every word. What is much more likely is the fact that government authorities are capturing your speech and processing it for terms or phrases that appear to indicate suspicious activity, and of even more interest is the statistical analysis of phone calling tendencies – who you’re calling, how frequently, what habits you usually have and therefore what habits you’re violating!

Conspiracy theories are all around about what a government would even do with all these facts. We want to suppose we don’t reside in a police country in which thought-crime is a big issue, but possibly we do and we’re not even conscious of it. And you’re reading this article, I wonder if the government has deemed this as sensitive and can they be taking particular consideration in those people who’ve set aside time to read it? They might without doubt track that sort of thing, whoever “they” are.

If you could record telephone calls yourself, from any individual you liked, I wonder who you’d listen in on? And does one actually feel tempted to pay attention to things with regard to nosiness or possibly since you think it is essential to fight crime? I inquired my co-workers who they’d listen into and most of them mentioned plenty of celebrities in the news – people who are already worrying for every single word they are saying, I want to know why it is that many of us would like to listen to them a lot more than ever before?

One of my co-workers pondered on the creation of an unknown celeb where a TV corporation overseas could record phone calls of a random member of the public and in addition hide secret cameras and stick to them around. You could possibly develop a whole soap opera around this random unsuspicious member of the public and only people overseas will be aware of it. Definitely a scary concept though isn’t it! Maybe it’s already happening and it’s you that’s the foreign celebrity. Could be smart to wear something different tomorrow and smile a bit more often because all the tabloids and Television shows will be commenting on it.

Practically, to record telephone calls you can just cut right into a wire in the phone’s receiver and attach that to a line of a receiver. You can purchase kits which help you do this for just a modest amount of cash, but it looks quite clear when you’ve modified the receiver. This implies that those celebs who notice that a news paper has opted for record phone calls at their expense has been doing it as a result of more illicit ways. Generally all network centers use a call listening center, so all it requires is an unscrupulous member of staff having a particular desire for listening in to some particular calls. In most cases a fee of the proper amount would persuade someone to do the dastardly action. Sad but true.

E-books have become very popular over the last couple of years. A great deal of the credit for that should go to the Amazon Kindle reader which, whilst it may not have been the first reader to be released, has been a real driving force in the growth and development of the market for both e-book readers and the associated e-books.

E-books are predicted to make up somewhere between 12 to 15% of total book sales in 2011. The market is still developing, but e-books are becoming an ever more important factor in the publishing world. The importance of e-books may even be a little higher than the percentage sales suggest. At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems likely that e-book reader owners will be likely to buy, and read, a lot of books. They are, in other words, the target demographic for the major publishing firms.

So it’s important that publishers get the price of e-books right. Or else they run the risk of upsetting some of their best customers. So what, exactly, would a fair price for an e-book be?

E-books don’t use paper, ink or bindings. Also, since they are not a physical product, there are no fees associated with delivery. So you would expect them to be quite a bit cheaper than normal printed books, wouldn’t you?

Or maybe not. According to publishers, the cost of paper, ink, bindings and transportation is only a small part of bringing a book to market. There are editing costs, proof reading costs, marketing costs etc. All things considered, the lack of a few reams of paper is, according to a number of major publishers, neither here nor there.

To a certain extent, you can see some logic in this argument. But it begs the question why, if these factors don’t influence book prices, is there such a difference between paperback and hardback prices? The argument doesn’t ring true.

Until quite recently, Amazon had a publicly declared policy of setting e-book prices at $9.99 or less. Until the big publishing houses took issue with it at least. One publisher’s books were briefly withdrawn from Amazon’s site at one point.

The agency pricing model has now been adopted by many publishers. What that means that the publishers set the selling price instead of the retailer. You may, whilst searching Amazon for something to read on your Kindle 3, come across the notice “this price was set by the publisher” – which is just Amazon’s way of making it clear that they did not set the price for that particular book.

On the other hand, many business analysts have suggested that Amazon’s $9.99 target price was unsustainable in the long term and that this may have been a loos leader from Amazon to allow users to get accustomed to e-books whilst simultaneously boosting Kindle sales.

Unlike a printed book, you can’t pass on your e-book to friends and family when you’re done with it (Kindle owners can now “lend” e-books out – for a fixed period only). You can’t sell it to a second hand book store or donate it to a charity shop or local library. E-books offer fewer end of life options than a standard print book in other words. Considering that you have fewer options with e-books, shouldn’t the price also be lower?

Today, the selling price of an e-book is whatever the publisher dictates. Not that means that you have to agree with them and pay that price of course.You could just wait for a couple of months and the price of the e-book may, as is often the case with video games, reduce significantly following the initial launch period.

You could even decide to spend your hard earned dollars on something entirely different – a DVD, a video game, tickets to a concert. You could watch TV or listen to the radio instead of reading a book. Books are, for the most part, a discretionary purchase and need to compete with a number of other products and services for both your leisure time and your money. As with any other discretionary purchase, an e-book should be pitched at the price that you are willing to pay for it. Not a penny more, not a penny less.

The biggest problem with software licence regulations is a lack of understanding. As of 2009, twenty seven per cent of the software being used in the United Kingdom was being done so illegally. This costs the British software economy over a billion pounds a year. A large amount in anyone’s books.

The root of the problem is that people confuse buying software and licensing software. Those who think this are wrong. When you buy software you are not buying the software itself, but a licence to use the software. Outright ownership of software is completely different.

Those who have trouble understanding this should think of it in the same way they think about their fishing licence.
Those who want to legally fish need to acquire a fishing licence. A fishing licence allows you to fish, but under certain conditions. There are a lot of regulations you must comply with.

Most people understand perfectly well that they are not buying the river where they will be fishing or its content, but buying a licence that allows them to fish on it. The same logic applies to software and software licence.

In nearly all cases you are not buying the software; you are buying a licence to use the software. You are essentially buying a fishing licence for software. You have a licence to use the software and you must comply with the specified regulations.

Software licence is all part of intellectual property law. Intellectual property laws serve a very good purpose. We must promote a greater understanding of software licence so we can repair the hole it is currently leaving in the economy.

Organisations are being educated on the matter by the British Software Association. The way forward is through education.

This does not mean that you will not be punished for neglecting your software licence. Staying on the software licence ball is your responsibility. A time will come when ignorance is not an excuse.