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It seems likely that the Supreme Court will not overturn the lower Court's decision, and that is good for artists and consumers. Good riddance to the big labels, I say.

But the question of compensating artists has not been addressed. We need to create an environment where downloaders want to support musicians they love rather than simply downloading their stuff for free.

Musicians need to start setting up tipjars and consumers need to ask rigorous question about how much of anything they purchase goes to an intermediary.

I recently went to a concert of Kristin Hersh where she sold no CD's but encouraged people to support her by buying mp3's of demos off her website. I bought $20 of mp3's off her website, of which Hersh received a significant percentage. Is that the future?

Here are some other thoughts about how to reward musicians

I've thought long and hard about this issue. The problem is not one of age. It's that of experience and familiarity with the latest technology/buzzwords. IN a college environment, students have the chance to play around with projects and to learn about their discipline full time. And if their degree plan is any good, they are probably learning concepts and languages which are not tied to any one proprietor. Midcareer professionals, on the other hand, basically are too busy to learn. Sure, they learn interesting things for the tasks specific to the job at hand, but that knowledge can be very domain-specific and not easily transferable to other companies. As for me, I am madly learning about new technologies, but my schedule and commitments limit me to only part time learning. When a part time learner competes against a full time learner, there is really no contest.

If you had a 40 year programmer, gave him 2 years to go to school full time, (paid for by parents) and use of the university's great network, there would be no difference between the older and younger candidate. Having full time to learn at college provides an undeniable boost to any learner's marketability, old or young.

Another thought. HR and recruiters use the "Must have 5 years experience" rule where they won't consider candidates with less than 5 years experience. I actually wrote an essay about the "Must-have-5-years-experience fallacy," but actually this fallacy works in favor of older workers.

So what is grandpa complaining about?

I wrote an article about this phenomenon a while back (when I was facing the same unrealistic job requirements).

My favorite anecdote was a job ad requiring 5 years experience writing technical manuals for military vehicles. People who write such job ads end up paying more than they should because of this "illusion of scarcity."

I wrote an essay about what such a book database would look like.
Books, Ontologies and Shared Dictionaries

Interestingly, many of the book reviews from the major sites (nytimes, ny review of books) charge for access to archived articles. When writing my longish longish essay on Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain , I had to go through hoops to figure out how to reach cached copies of these articles. Although dozens (if not hundreds) of people had reviewed this same book, only a handful were publicly accessible.

Unfortunately, this sort of project would be successful if the major book publications agree to open their content. i would argue that access to old movie reviews (like Roger Ebert, etc) on imdb hasn't hurt the respective publications. Perhaps if the project gains enough momentum, the major publications will see value in providing their content for free.

I hope this project succeeds (and more importantly finds funding), but I have to wonder what is so wrong with depending on newsgroups (easily accessible from google groups) to find reviews. It's free, easy and threaded, so conceivably people could reply to a thread on a specific book.

Robert Nagle

I don't want to belabor the point, but often it's not necessary to read a technical book from start to finish to review it. A good part of technical reviewing involves just reporting what the book does and doesn't have. Sometimes a book's quality can be determined simply how well it is organized (for a reference book, for instance), or on the quality and depth of its learning activities. Sometimes, there may be very good reasons for writing a review/preview/response without reading a book in its entirety. I once had a rather frivolous dialogue with Jeffrey Dean about the merits and drawbacks of writing reviews for books you haven't read completely. I'm not defending the practice of reviewing books you haven't read. Nor am I defending the value that comes with "living with a book" for several weeks or months. But the value of early reporting of a book sometimes outweigh the decision not to read the book entirely. Other Idiotprogrammer Book Reviews

I don't want to belabor the point, but often it's not necessary to read a technical book from start to finish to review it. A good part of technical reviewing involves just reporting what the book does and doesn't have. Sometimes a book's quality can be determined simply how well it is organized (for a reference book, for instance), or on the quality and depth of its learning activities. Sometimes, there may be very good reasons for writing a review/preview/response without reading a book in its entirety. I once had a rather frivolous dialogue with Jeffrey Dean about the merits and drawbacks of writing reviews for books you haven't read completely. I'm not defending the practice of reviewing books you haven't read. Nor am I defending the value that comes with "living with a book" for several weeks or months. But the value of early reporting of a book sometimes outweigh the decision not to read the book entirely. Other Idiotprogrammer Book Reviews

Well, I wish the litigator success, because it would definitely be a boon for PC's sold today to come equipped with more than one OS. However, nobody put a gun to the head of the OEM's who produced single system PC's. To win this case, you would need to demonstrate that the contracts between Microsoft and OEM's violated antitrust laws. Quite frankly, I doubt that this could be shown. Despite the finding of fact in the antitrust lawsuit, you would have to show that it was impossible or next to impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's.

But Dell has been able to sell Linux (which apparently they dropped, but don't worry, HP is now selling them). And other PC companies have been able to do the same (albeit in limited numbers).

To prove that it was impossible for OEM's to sell PC's with alternate OS's, you would need to demonstrate some sort of collusion between Microsoft and Intel, making it difficult for developers to produce alternate OS's on Intel CPU's. That clearly has not happened. The x86 Intel platform certainly didn't hinder kernel development, and Intel has been relatively open about publishing specs.

Good luck Be. Truly, I feel your pain.

Robert Nagle Idiotprogrammer
Austin, Texas, idiotprogrammer, Technical writer