OT Prieni -- This is what originally George contributed:

“Every penny spent on stupid gimmicks for stupid people is one less penny for useful features, or better quality construction.”

Ignoring the substantive poverty of the point made – as for example pointed out by Don – I am at a complete loss to understand your failure to spot the *entirely gratuitous* insult in there.

Scott, don’t worry about George. I am fairly confident he didn’t mean to insult you personally; it has merely become a way of life for him.

Indeed perhaps the most useful new feature Pentax could develop would be an innovative sensor and associated mechanism for administering a sharp, non-lethal electric shock to jolt the Georges of this world out of their misanthropic ways.

Sony and Samsung have both recently come out and said that Consumer Electronics demand generally has fallen off a cliff.

As such Pentax (read Hoya) could yet scrap those model launches but I think the alliance with Samsung is going to work in our favour, since a release schedule jointly committed to requires management time to abandon; it may just be too much bother.

In fact that isn’t true; in order to start a bank you need to first meet capital adequacy ratios and be regulated by the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority.

Rules and regulations in this area are supposed to ensure that banks are financially sound and operate their business accordingly, and while there has recently been a clear breakdown not only in this respect but also in private sector risk controls generally, this means nothing more than a collective failure, and certainly not a systematic deficiency in the money creation mechanism.

As for the video, I didn’t have to watch it very long to realise that it is a rehash of the many and varied claims emanating from the goldbug community, who as a rule are sadly more than a few doubloons short of a full treasure chest.

Therefore I can only deal with the one specific sensationalist claim I did see, that money is a debt; of course it is, if nobody had to deliver against the debt it would have no value, just as an IOU would have no value if you wrote it out to yourself. It is however, ultimately secured by the real assets of economy wide participants: companies, factories, houses, even the odd piece of shiny jewellery.

However, in respect of the latter it must be said that in the era of explicitly gold-backed currencies the incidence of financial instability measured by market panics and crashes was far, far greater than under the modern system, which is a fact that golbugs rarely if ever mention.

If you want documentary and fairly dispassionate proof of that I would recommend Charles Kindleberger’s excellent “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises”. See
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Manias-Panics-Crashes-Financial-Investment/dp/0471467146

The good news is that your site looks fairly nice and uses well-formed, standards compliant HTML. However, you mention you have had little traffic from search engines which is unsurprising since you have done little in the way of search engine optimisation (SEO).

As such there is plenty of low-hanging fruit that will considerably lift your chances of driving visitors from search engines but it is still a going to be a hard slog.

In general the problem is that your fledgling business and the presentation thereof is based on images, whereas search engines are designed to process text; your basic SEO issue is you need much more of that.

Google have very helpfully just produced a document that describes in broad terms the areas you should focus on; read this very carefully:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.p...

It is nevertheless critical to emphasise that no matter how many page names, jpeg file names and alt property tags you rename, none of this will carry much weight if these hopefully keyword laden nuggets do not appear elsewhere within the body of your web copy.

Therefore depending on how much text you feel comfortable in producing for each of your engagement types, you might consider splitting these into two pages, for example portraitPhotography.htm (nb: not portfolioXYZ.htm) containing lots of copy plus a few choice image examples and portraitPhotographyPortfolio.htm with a broader selection.

However, I think the area with the best scope for increasing your SEO reach is targeting far more regional related keywords. For example, looking at a map I am unsure whether you are North or East Devon, but you should use whichever is appropriate, what about Exmoor, and in particular other regional names commonly in use in your area (these are what your prospective customers are likely to be searching for).

To reinforce these I would try to author 2 new pages; a bio/about page laden with regional references and assignment types, and a sort of CV/work undertaken page, with headings using h2 tags containing type of work and location if this looks reasonably diverse. The former page will also allow you to drop your name from the other pages’ title tags thereby freeing up valuable real estate for more keywords.

Once you are satisfied with your website makeover you should prepare a sitemap as directed by google, then apply for a listing with the open directory project: http://www.dmoz.org/ This is picked up by numerous third party directories and will help to lend weight to you search engine rankings.

Good luck!

Wanted to share my own anecdotal experiences with Dell; I switched around 2 years ago having gone through 5 Toshiba models since the early 90s (The only problem I had ever had with one of these was when a typically over hand-baggaged fellow passenger crammed an oversized roller case on top of my bag in the overhead compartment and cracked the screen on a flight to Warsaw).

My reason for switching was that at the time Dell was the only supplier I found credible to produce a laptop with a high end graphics card and large dedicated memory (Precision M70).

The graphics card then subsequently blew and was replaced 5 times with the laptop aged between 6-15 months, including on one occasion during an overseas trip although admittedly nowhere near as exotic as India.

While I must applaud Dell’s customer service response (faultless next business day support) there has got to be something wrong with the basic design, and they finally agreed giving me a generous and highly upgraded replacement last summer.

The graphics card has subsequently only failed once on this new machine, and was as usual replaced with consummate speed, but I have my doubts about the design. Next time I have to put a hand into my own pocket I I’ll certainly be looking elsewhere.

Without knowing much at all about those cameras from what I can gather the likely market amongst high end pros is not at all price sensitive.

As such I would suspect Pentax would be inclined to milk the price as far as possible, which would also be consistent with probably small volumes.

However, this could have the considerable added benefit of helping to restore something of a premium feel over the Pentax name and might help to lift pricing on their existing models; offering rich features cheaply is a great deal for customers in the short term, but the risk is that Pentax go belly-up in the process.

I believe Pentax are probably in a quandary regarding FF; clearly it is an important issue to a meaningful part of their customer base but at the same time the lions share of that market segment has passed them by.

Furthermore, with global recession if not downright depression in the offing this high-end segment is likely to come under severe pressure. And since Pentax have apparently been either unprofitable or only marginally so since the late 1990s I simply don’t believe they have anywhere near the financial resources to make a move in this segment; it would be financial suicide.

On the other hand, I think what appears to be their emerging strategy of rebuilding the customer base from the bottom up is spot on, since – IF they can stay the course – it would develop a food chain for lens sales that would help to shore up profitability.

Full Story: http://www.whatdigitalcamera.com/news/Samsung_confirms_plans_for_new_DSLR_news_2...

That is absolutely true, but they can not legally do so retroactively.

Therefore as long as you keep your eye out for any sneaky changes in the ToS, your existing agreement stands, and will forever govern the contractual basis on which content was originally posted to the site.

And being domiciled in the State of California you can bet your last CDO they would be sued faster than you can say class action lawsuit, if they tried to play any funny games with that.

Yes they do. I’ll go over this one final time:

1. You have captured an image. You own all rights to it, specifically the ownership rights to a piece of intellectual property (IP).

2. Unless you sell those ownership rights outright, the sale or transfer of *limited usage rights* to the IP takes the legal form of a license. The specific terms of the license vary from case to case.

3. The legal definition of a payment for a license is a royalty.

4. The only way this lot can legally transfer limited usage rights to a third party (ie sell) is by way of a licence, specifically a sub-license as referenced in paragraph 9 sub-para d. However, this must be a sub-license “of the foregoing” terms specifically stipulating that the license is royalty free. This means they can not charge for it.

QED.

Further, the term “distribute” has a specific legal meaning, and I am fairly certain it implies an agency relationship, where no legal rights are conferred by the agent directly who instead takes a cut from the seller being always the legal owner.

This differs slightly from the examples of physical distributors you mention, but the key flaw in your analogy is that these are again paid by the seller rather than the buyer, assuming it is a system not involving wholesalers as is clearly not the case here.

They could obviously do that but it wouldn’t be legal.

Law related to licences broadly falls under law of contract. For a contract - or in this case a license conferring rights of usage - to be valid there must be consideration/payment.

If there was no payment, as is the only possibility given the condition that a sub-license must be royalty free, the contract would be voidable. Further, if you are the IP owner you would have standing to sue, since you are both directly injured financially by this invalid contract and a related contractual party. As such you would win actions for voiding any third party licenses and consequential and punitive damages against your direct licensee, as assessed by the State courts in California.

Well I agree with that, and indeed have said so already.

I look forward to you documenting that, but in the absence of this I now consider this discussion closed. What a waste of time.