You didn't know what to do. And if you
looked in help as to why your mouse wasn't working it referred to the
button by NAME and didn't show the picture of the Icon.
That's one of my favorite things about GUI interfaces.
If we just get rid of all those pesky words, everything
will be better, right? Then try and explain a problem
to someone on the phone... Novice: "Um, well I clicked
on the thingie over near that other widget."
Expert: "You mean the miniaturized icon in the
system tray located on the taskbar?" Novice: "Uhhh..."
This is actually a very old design problem...
the first example I remember hearing about was
motorized farm equipment that used a "tortoise"
and a "hare" for "slower" and "faster". You need
to be familiar with a particular fable in order
to use the tractor? Have you checked that every
country you're going to market this tractor to
understands that fable?
One of my early introductions to the gloriously "easy
to use" Macintosh was trying to figure out how to
set a tab in Macwrite. I spent a lot of time laborious
checking and double-checking the menus looking for
something about tabs. For some reason, it did not
occur to me to grab a funny hieroglyphic
mouse and drag it somewhere.
Of course, these days, everything is supposed to
have a tool-tip/ballon-help thing that appears when you
do a mouse-over. No we've got much easier to use
interfaces, where all you have to do is hover the mouse
over every visible feature to figure out what it
does, if anything.
No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem.
That sorts correctly!;-)
Ah, someone else that agrees with me on that!
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the US) drive me
completely batty. MM/DD/YY? No! That makes no sense. YYYY-MM-DD makes
the meaning far more clear, and you can even extend it arbitrarily...
YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-uu.
Actually, what I think is batty is computer geeks
who think that all human practices should be
changed in order to make it easier to write
programs.
I stick with Merkin format myself, whenever possible,
and I deeply resent your cultural insensitivity
on this subject.
Just a few words in defense of "conspiracy theorists"...
daveschroeder wrote:
I didn't mention it in my original message, but my favorite
conspiracy theory is that John Kerry's campaign probably
decided [...]
"Conspiracy theorists" are always getting beaten up on
issues like this, but I'm not sure it's strictly fair...
In addition to proposing a hypothetical scenario about
Republican corruption, I'm *also* supposed to be a
mind-reader, and be able to explain away why John Kerry
did what he did?
The whole "motives" issue, seems like a lose-lose
proposition. On the one hand, if you don't speculate
on why so-and-so did such-and-such people will regard
the theory as incomplete, too far-fetched. If you do
speculate on it, you seem like you're over-reaching,
claiming knowledge of things you can't possibly know
about.
The journalists all said they'd kill for a juicy election
fraud story, but there was none to be found...not even one
that might exist but have no "proof".
A lot of us have a lot less faith in the good old
"muck-raking journalist", having had to listen to a rather
uncritical, monotonous drum-beat during the Iraq war
run-up.
My favorite retort for this one is that all of the corporate
media (i.e., all mainstream newspapers, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN,
FNC, etc.) are all in Bush's "pocket", and that even though
there is widespread proof of election fraud, the corporate
press has ordered all of its staff to "lock the story down"
and not speak of it further.
Uh huh... let's roll the clock back, and consider the WMD
issue during the Iraq war build-up. Isn't it ridiculous to
suggest that the *entire* media could be asleep at the
switch for some reason? Certainly if there was some reason
to be critical of the administration's claims on this issue,
*someone* in the media would be all over it, wouldn't they?
I mean, the New York Times is hardly a Republican
strong-hold, is it? Are you trying to tell me that Judith
Miller has been bought by the Other Side? Oh, please.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that their
tautologies: everything can be neatly explained away, no
matter how absurd it is, and you can still believe what you
want to believe.
And of course, you'd expect that an *actual* conspiracy
would be a really clumsy affair, with lots of leaks (Diebold
memos, anyone?), lots of funny statistical discrepancies, etc.
Of course it helps that many people will *immediately*
reject any suggestion of corruption, tossing it in the
"conspriacy theory" bin.
The election was not stolen. Bush won. (I didn't vote for
Bush.) Get over it.
Your faith is touching, but why is it supposed to touch me?
Anyway, in the long run, whether or not this election was
"stolen" is small beans compared improving the integrity
of the voting system to make sure that they can't ever
be stolen... there I think we're in agreement.
In short, for a site that is devoted to "media studies", you
would think they would know how to present data in a
convincing manner at least.
Haven't met many Communications majors, eh?
And no, I'm not saying that irregularities don't exist - the
county comparison in Florida is quite intriguing - just that
the particular web-site you provided for state by state
comparison is very lacking.
Yeah okay. All I was saying is that I'd like to see someone
work on the problem a little more deeply, and I'm glad the
Berkeley guys are on the job.
But I see that the Caltech-MIT voting project
came to the opposite conclusion as the Berkeley study:
[...] this VTP Report demonstrates that there is no evidence based
on exit poll results to conclude that there was fraud in the
2004 Presidential election.
Uh, oh, Berkeley's taking on Caltech-MIT.
I wonder when Stanford is going to weigh-in...
I don't believe the cost estimates. These have a way of changing when things are put into production.
Electricity is only as clean as electricity generation, and in the united states that's incredibly dirty (coal). If you don't fix that first, you're probably better off burning gasoline
in most places, even given energy efficiency advantages for this PRT.
Be prepared for NIMBYism in (a) views being blocked by the monorail, (b) the noise of the cars going by the windows of second story apartments.
And finally, the point which you will all shrug off because you can't stick a number on it easily:
one of the big disadvantages of private vehicles is one of the things people love about them: they're private. We all like to crawl off into our little boxes and complain about how boring our lives are because nothing new happens, because we've walled ourselves off from serendipity. Worse than that, Americans are losing a sense of themselves as a people, in part because they have no contact with masses of human beings... there's
a lot of suburban paranoia about houses full of latino immigrants that might be soft peddled a bit if you saw the guys on the bus every day.
Some people have been saying that this is a wider
problem than just in Florida. It's been claimed
that the famous discrepancy between exit polls and election results depends in general on whether electronic voting was in use:
Thanks, that looks like a better place to report
a problem. (I heard the email address from one
person who *probably* knows what they're talking
about, but it is true I haven't confirmed it
anywhere).
I've heard that Kerry is considering retracting his
concession, and that if you've personally observed
"voter disenfranchisement" in Ohio, you should phone the
DNC (202) 863-8000 or send email to: CKerry@Mintz.com.
(Interestingly enough, the Green Party is also legally
allowed to demand a recount: the catch is that they've got to be
able to pay the $100,000 price tag...)
Yeah, largely... though as I understand it a bunch
of the emacs primitives were re-written in C for
speed at one point. So it's not precisely just a lisp interpreter down there at the bottom.
Real programmers install Cygwin on their computer and search it with
find piped to xargs grep.
I do a lot of searching just on the names
of files (and paths), essentially doing a locate term1 | fgrep term2 | fgrep term3...
-- though really I've got a script called "relate", that
works like: relate term1 term2 term3
Of course, this requires that you've got an slocate
database update via chron every night, as every linux
box does...
And I don't do much find/xargs/grep stuff these
days, I prefer things like M-x find-grep
inside of emacs...
In any case, what's an order of magnitude between friends. It's more than 0 (or 1 in a really bad year for nuclear), and that should be sufficient.
Well, maybe it should be, but consider a statement like: "The anti-nuclear movement of the seventies is directly responsible for ____ american deaths." 40,000+ would put it in the neighborhood
of a year's worth of car collisions (if I remember right). If it's 400,000+, you could plausibly say
"half a million", which would be a pretty killer rhetorical bomb...
(Except that in fact it's a little too good, and no one would believe you weren't just making it up. So forget I said anything.)
The problem comes when people claim that this impossibly high standard
is not nearly enough, and though coal can kill 20,000 people a year in
the US alone, nuclear must conclusively prove that it will never (over
the course of millions of years to come) harm anybody in order to be
even considered as an alternative.
Do you have a reference on that figure "20000"?
I thought I remembered reading it was around 2000,
but I don't have a good cite on that either.
(I'm not doubting you, you understand... I tend
to say things like "you'd need to have a chernobyl
every year for nuclear power to be worse than coal".)
We had a major traumatic experience on 9/11. It was a wakeup call, and our populace did something about it yesterday. We re-elected the man that has taken care of the problem. Instead of flying jumbo jets into our buildings, the terrorists are on the run. So what if we haven't caught Bin Laden yet? When we do kill that SOB, someone else will simply take his place, and we'll get that SOB, too. The point is that we're not sitting around waiting to be attacked, then begging the UN's permission to defend ourselves. We have no obligation to do so, and any candidate that wants to will never get my vote.
The thing you liberals just don't understand is that there is no negotiating with terrorists. They do not care! You cannot negotiate with someone who wants to chop your head off. They hate you liberals as much as they hate everyone else. You think they will be your friends if you just appease them and kneel to their demands. That is complete and utter bullshit and until you people start to admit that to yourselves, you will continue to live in your respective mental caves.
If you want to come up with a scheme to
improve American elections, it better not have
any froofy french-sounding name like "Condorcet"
attached to it.
"Instant Runoff" works, because it sounds like some new kind of lottery ticket.
*sigh* Why do i have to keep deconstructing the same things
again and again. I'm not even going to talk to whatever
agenda you are advocating, im going deal strictly with
practical concerns.
Yes indeed, because technical stuff is the only thing that
matters. "Privacy", "community", *feh* how impractical.
These people and their silly agendas. *Sigh*. If only we
were all geniuses such as yourself you could give your
deconstructo set a rest.
Actually airplanes today already have transponders, as well
as onboard radar, and air traffic control tracking radar,
and yet they still manage to have mid air collisions.
Yeah, once in a hundred blue moons. The problem is
non-existant compared to car collisions.
Now imagine if you will tens of thousands of people heading
out from work to go home all trying to navigate a slot into
the general direction of say, the NYC suburbs. Looking at
the highways, and the accidents therein humans aren't doing a
perfect job either.
Well you know, in the event that the flying car airspace was
getting too crowded for the automatics to handle, I would
suggest having rules against flying the cars there.
Fly your car from Pennslyvania to New Jersey? Yeah, okay.
Land on top of the Empire State Building? No, probably
not. Take to the ground and go over the bridge, or hop on
a path train.
If we reasonable assume an aircar would be going at a
greater speed than that of a ground car, the chance for
human error when doing an insertion into say something going
the speed of a nascar race is shocking.
Uh, so the automatics have to take over sooner?
You also seem to straw-man the very real concern of flying
one of these things into a building.
Okay, I was willing to let you get away with a meaningless
use of "deconstruction", but what the hell do you mean by
"straw man" here? A straw man is a non-existant concern
brought up for rhetorical purposes because it's easy to
argue with.
Tell me which airspace will be controlled and which won't?
You leaving it up to me? How about all of them? The FAA
would presumably have different answers, depending on the
cababilities of the automatic control systems. (Are you
under the impression that I *like* the flying car idea?)
"Uh, I think you've got 9-11 on the brain. Flaming death
from the skies, oh my."
This comment is plain asinine. there have been several
incidents of aircraft hitting buildings prior to 9/11, and
those fall into only 2 categories accidental and
intentional. What is your flip answer for dealing with this?
I'm saying that these incidents are astoundingly rare, just
highly publicized; that the technology in question is
entirely different from the hypothetical technology under
discussion; that 9-11 itself is something of a one-off
for any number of reasons (which I will detail if you
insist); and that any usage of flying cars as kamikazee
assault vehicles would achieve nothing resembling the scale
of damage that the 9-11 hijackers achieved with commercial
air-liners.
I think you're busy fighting the last war, not the next one.
One beneficiary of computerized navigation is national
security: thanks to G.P.S. and cellphone technology, flying
cars could be tracked more easily than any road
vehicle. NASA is already at work on a device that will
function as an on-board air-traffic controller, and the
agency expects to have it ready in time for the debut of its
first flying car, the EQuiPT, or Easy Quiet Personal
Transport. (NASA prefers the term ''personal air vehicle''
to ''flying car.'') The vehicle will automatically broadcast
information on its location, so ground monitors and every
other aircraft in the sky will know exactly who and where
you are. (Any rogue vehicle ought to be easily spotted;
another driver who sees a car that is in the air but not on
his monitor can be expected to sound the alarm.)
Lets look at this further,
Yes, certainly. But the point that I was trying to make is
that the slant of this article is "Aircars will give us an
excuse to track everyones movements! Thank god!". Once
upon a time, when the United States regarded itself as
a free country, this would have been an unheard of
sentiment. And here 'tis in the (nominally) liberal
New York Times.
Let us hope that David Brin is right about "The Transparent
Society" because "privacy" is now regarded as quaint and
old-fashioned.
Now let me see what you've got here:
Ok so they can track them, its
doesn't state that it can control them remotely, however a
reasonable person would have to assume that you would have
to.
Sorry, I'm pretty sure they mentioned the idea that it would
only let the driver drive when not doing something stupid,
then the automatics would take over. (This is a pretty good
metaphor for the current state of American society, come to
think of it... Freedom to do what is allowed. )
On top of this just a few weeks ago NPR had an article about
computer controlled ground cars. Those systems are current
setup to leave a space between cars of 100 feet.
I'm not familar with that system, but many people take
a kind of "highway cruise control" as the first goal. Though actually,
the zeroth goal is an alarm system: alert the driver if they
seem to be veering off the road, etc. If I remember right, an alarm that goes off when you're too close to a car has already been demo'd.
A) If a driverless control system isn't ready to be used on
normal cars its still going to be a ways off for air cars.
I think you're confused about the relative difficulty of the
two tasks. There's a lot more airspace than there is
road surface area. Also, avoiding vehicles with built-in transponders is far simpler than having to identify them by radar.
B) That there is will the concern of overriding the system,
and if one had an aircar full of explosives, is air traffic
control going to be able to put it somewhere 'safe' in the 2
seconds it'll take to make a left turn into the side of a
building?
Uh, I think you've got 9-11 on the brain. Flaming death
from the skies, oh my.
As other people have pointed out, there are eaisier, and
more deadly things that can be done, without the use of
kamikazee pilots.
It's far more likely that this aircar dream will remain a
dream because of excessive costs (e.g. the fuel required),
rather than Fear of Terrorism.
And further, I think the guys who love this idea are
confused about the real problem of "sprawl". Clogged
highways is just a small part of it. There's something
profoundly warped about the impulse behind it "ah, if only
I could stay cocooned in a little metal box forever, and
never have to encounter another human being".
Democracy can't survive a people that refuses to
ride the bus.
just as a comparison, the web was doing just fine before it
became overrun with adds. Before the companies made
billboards of it, there was plenty of content that was put
up just so people could get to the information.
You have a point of course, but then, that's the reason I
mentioned that a semantic web can work (1) within a group
of dedicated volunteers who understand and care about it.
But let's noodle this around a little... by my guess is that
the ad hoc volunteers that are willing to put up web sites
about things would not be a very good match for the
"dedicated volunteers" I was referring to.
The reason being that the web is unstructured, you do
whatever you want with it until it looks good. Putting up a
list of all Saint novels put out under the name Leslie
Charteris is a comparatively easy task, compared to marking
up that list with appropriate meta information.
So what you need is something like, say Musicbrainz, that
runs in actual database with fill-in-the-blanks forms to get
the right information in the right places. But if you've
gone that route, then what you have is a centralized
database, and any semantic web XML mark-up jazz you add to
that is just going to be an add-on.
I'm afraid that the future may belong to the imdb.com's of
the world, rather than to the de-centralized semantic web
dream... much in the same way we've signed over the job of
identification to credit card companies, and the PGP
web-of-trust dream seems to be fairly stagnant.
He mentions in passing that there are "challenges"
about privacy and "intellectual property",
but then skips away from the subject.
You can get semantic markup to work :
(1) within a group of dedicated volunteers who understand and
care about it;
(2) within a large organization, where the ontology can
be forcibly standardized, and it's use can be dictated.
Getting it to work out on the Web as We Know It has
so many problems, it's kind of crazy... Even if you can skip past the problems of deceptiveness (let's say by authentication and strong laws against fraud) Much of the
information that's published is advertising supported.
Where's the incentive to mark that information up
with semantic tags so that people can skip passed the
ads? It's hard to see how you can get to semantic
web heaven without some kind of automated micro-payment
system.
Unfortunately, each link only conveys a little bit of information. A
link from page A to page B is assumed to be an endorsement of page B's
relevance by page A. But what if you could add extra metadata to the
links?
Yes indeed. It's particularly annoying that if
you want to talk something down it's best not to
use a live link to them, else you may inadvertantly
give them some google juice because you think
they suck.
Vanevar Bush, check, Douglas Englebart, check,
Ted Nelson... oops, they missed Ted Nelson.
That's a suprise. You either need to (a) get
rich or (b) be an establishment-approved "visionary"
like Vanevar Bush to get your name in the history
books.
Next problem: Marc Andreesen releases "his" Mosaic
web browser? He was hardly the sole author of that
code.
Security becomes a nightmare. the borders of every country would need
to have an override system to force all cars into approved entry
points.
Listen: try READING THE DAMN ARTICLE.
Once more: READ THE DAMN ARTICLE.
(Hint: security doesn't become a nightmare, security is the nightmare.)
You do not get cute points for being proud of
not taking the trouble to read what you're commenting on. You get a flashing "I am an lazy idiot"
sign hung on your forehead.
(This goes for the bozo who modded you up, too.
Try this one, simple little rule of thumb: YOU DON'T MOD UP SOMEONE WHO HASN'T BOTHERED TO
READ THE ARICLE.)
I was an Emusic subscriber, but they kept jerking around the users.
They continually changed the terms of the service. And their support
for Linux was pathetic/nonexistent. What confidence can you have that
the service you subscribe to is the service you'll eventually get?
Welcome to the joys of publicly traded companies, eh?
There is no way you can know. Look at the deal, decide if
you want to go for it, if later they go back on the deal,
then you should cancel the service. What's at stake, $10?
I'm not that enthusiastic about MP3s, myself, but I'd
consider going with Emusic just to hold the door open
to unencumbered audio-formats... (I wonder what's going
to happen when the current iTunes fanatics realize that
what they've bought isn't really what they think they've
bought?)
Anyway: I used to work for some place called "Emusic",
but that was a long time ago and several buy-outs away.
It could be that I'm biased, but I'm not sure which way.
And the review in the local San Francisco Bay
Guardian Substance Abuse,
says:
the average moviegoer (even one who liked I, Robot) is bound to find Innocence unbearably pretentious and boring. But mileage for those who are perhaps pretentious and boring themselves may vary.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my early introductions to the gloriously "easy to use" Macintosh was trying to figure out how to set a tab in Macwrite. I spent a lot of time laborious checking and double-checking the menus looking for something about tabs. For some reason, it did not occur to me to grab a funny hieroglyphic mouse and drag it somewhere.
Of course, these days, everything is supposed to have a tool-tip/ballon-help thing that appears when you do a mouse-over. No we've got much easier to use interfaces, where all you have to do is hover the mouse over every visible feature to figure out what it does, if anything.
I stick with Merkin format myself, whenever possible, and I deeply resent your cultural insensitivity on this subject.
daveschroeder wrote:
"Conspiracy theorists" are always getting beaten up on issues like this, but I'm not sure it's strictly fair... In addition to proposing a hypothetical scenario about Republican corruption, I'm *also* supposed to be a mind-reader, and be able to explain away why John Kerry did what he did? The whole "motives" issue, seems like a lose-lose proposition. On the one hand, if you don't speculate on why so-and-so did such-and-such people will regard the theory as incomplete, too far-fetched. If you do speculate on it, you seem like you're over-reaching, claiming knowledge of things you can't possibly know about. A lot of us have a lot less faith in the good old "muck-raking journalist", having had to listen to a rather uncritical, monotonous drum-beat during the Iraq war run-up. Uh huh... let's roll the clock back, and consider the WMD issue during the Iraq war build-up. Isn't it ridiculous to suggest that the *entire* media could be asleep at the switch for some reason? Certainly if there was some reason to be critical of the administration's claims on this issue, *someone* in the media would be all over it, wouldn't they? I mean, the New York Times is hardly a Republican strong-hold, is it? Are you trying to tell me that Judith Miller has been bought by the Other Side? Oh, please. And of course, you'd expect that an *actual* conspiracy would be a really clumsy affair, with lots of leaks (Diebold memos, anyone?), lots of funny statistical discrepancies, etc.Of course it helps that many people will *immediately* reject any suggestion of corruption, tossing it in the "conspriacy theory" bin.
Your faith is touching, but why is it supposed to touch me?Anyway, in the long run, whether or not this election was "stolen" is small beans compared improving the integrity of the voting system to make sure that they can't ever be stolen... there I think we're in agreement.
But I see that the Caltech-MIT voting project came to the opposite conclusion as the Berkeley study:
Uh, oh, Berkeley's taking on Caltech-MIT. I wonder when Stanford is going to weigh-in...- I don't believe the cost estimates. These have a way of changing when things are put into production.
- Electricity is only as clean as electricity generation, and in the united states that's incredibly dirty (coal). If you don't fix that first, you're probably better off burning gasoline
in most places, even given energy efficiency advantages for this PRT.
- Be prepared for NIMBYism in (a) views being blocked by the monorail, (b) the noise of the cars going by the windows of second story apartments.
And finally, the point which you will all shrug off because you can't stick a number on it easily: one of the big disadvantages of private vehicles is one of the things people love about them: they're private. We all like to crawl off into our little boxes and complain about how boring our lives are because nothing new happens, because we've walled ourselves off from serendipity. Worse than that, Americans are losing a sense of themselves as a people, in part because they have no contact with masses of human beings... there's a lot of suburban paranoia about houses full of latino immigrants that might be soft peddled a bit if you saw the guys on the bus every day.- state by state comparison
- by county in Florida
This Berkeley study is the first attempt I've heard of to dig a little deeper into this issue.Thanks, that looks like a better place to report a problem. (I heard the email address from one person who *probably* knows what they're talking about, but it is true I haven't confirmed it anywhere).
I've heard that Kerry is considering retracting his concession, and that if you've personally observed "voter disenfranchisement" in Ohio, you should phone the DNC (202) 863-8000 or send email to: CKerry@Mintz.com.
(Interestingly enough, the Green Party is also legally allowed to demand a recount: the catch is that they've got to be able to pay the $100,000 price tag...)
Yeah, largely... though as I understand it a bunch of the emacs primitives were re-written in C for speed at one point. So it's not precisely just a lisp interpreter down there at the bottom.
Really, emacs is an IDE. Emacs is the perfect environment for extending emacs.
locate term1 | fgrep term2 | fgrep term3
-- though really I've got a script called "relate", that works like:
relate term1 term2 term3
Of course, this requires that you've got an slocate database update via chron every night, as every linux box does...
And I don't do much find/xargs/grep stuff these days, I prefer things like M-x find-grep inside of emacs...
(Except that in fact it's a little too good, and no one would believe you weren't just making it up. So forget I said anything.)
(I'm not doubting you, you understand... I tend to say things like "you'd need to have a chernobyl every year for nuclear power to be worse than coal".)
I think your wake-up call put you to sleep.
"Instant Runoff" works, because it sounds like some new kind of lottery ticket.
I think you're busy fighting the last war, not the next one.
Let us hope that David Brin is right about "The Transparent Society" because "privacy" is now regarded as quaint and old-fashioned.
Now let me see what you've got here:
Sorry, I'm pretty sure they mentioned the idea that it would only let the driver drive when not doing something stupid, then the automatics would take over. (This is a pretty good metaphor for the current state of American society, come to think of it... Freedom to do what is allowed. ) I'm not familar with that system, but many people take a kind of "highway cruise control" as the first goal. Though actually, the zeroth goal is an alarm system: alert the driver if they seem to be veering off the road, etc. If I remember right, an alarm that goes off when you're too close to a car has already been demo'd. I think you're confused about the relative difficulty of the two tasks. There's a lot more airspace than there is road surface area. Also, avoiding vehicles with built-in transponders is far simpler than having to identify them by radar. Uh, I think you've got 9-11 on the brain. Flaming death from the skies, oh my.As other people have pointed out, there are eaisier, and more deadly things that can be done, without the use of kamikazee pilots.
It's far more likely that this aircar dream will remain a dream because of excessive costs (e.g. the fuel required), rather than Fear of Terrorism.
And further, I think the guys who love this idea are confused about the real problem of "sprawl". Clogged highways is just a small part of it. There's something profoundly warped about the impulse behind it "ah, if only I could stay cocooned in a little metal box forever, and never have to encounter another human being".
Democracy can't survive a people that refuses to ride the bus.
But let's noodle this around a little... by my guess is that the ad hoc volunteers that are willing to put up web sites about things would not be a very good match for the "dedicated volunteers" I was referring to.
The reason being that the web is unstructured, you do whatever you want with it until it looks good. Putting up a list of all Saint novels put out under the name Leslie Charteris is a comparatively easy task, compared to marking up that list with appropriate meta information.
So what you need is something like, say Musicbrainz, that runs in actual database with fill-in-the-blanks forms to get the right information in the right places. But if you've gone that route, then what you have is a centralized database, and any semantic web XML mark-up jazz you add to that is just going to be an add-on.
I'm afraid that the future may belong to the imdb.com's of the world, rather than to the de-centralized semantic web dream... much in the same way we've signed over the job of identification to credit card companies, and the PGP web-of-trust dream seems to be fairly stagnant.
You can get semantic markup to work : (1) within a group of dedicated volunteers who understand and care about it; (2) within a large organization, where the ontology can be forcibly standardized, and it's use can be dictated.
Getting it to work out on the Web as We Know It has so many problems, it's kind of crazy... Even if you can skip past the problems of deceptiveness (let's say by authentication and strong laws against fraud) Much of the information that's published is advertising supported. Where's the incentive to mark that information up with semantic tags so that people can skip passed the ads? It's hard to see how you can get to semantic web heaven without some kind of automated micro-payment system.
Next problem: Marc Andreesen releases "his" Mosaic web browser? He was hardly the sole author of that code.
Once more: READ THE DAMN ARTICLE.
(Hint: security doesn't become a nightmare, security is the nightmare.)
You do not get cute points for being proud of not taking the trouble to read what you're commenting on. You get a flashing "I am an lazy idiot" sign hung on your forehead.
(This goes for the bozo who modded you up, too. Try this one, simple little rule of thumb: YOU DON'T MOD UP SOMEONE WHO HASN'T BOTHERED TO READ THE ARICLE.)
There is no way you can know. Look at the deal, decide if you want to go for it, if later they go back on the deal, then you should cancel the service. What's at stake, $10?
I'm not that enthusiastic about MP3s, myself, but I'd consider going with Emusic just to hold the door open to unencumbered audio-formats... (I wonder what's going to happen when the current iTunes fanatics realize that what they've bought isn't really what they think they've bought?)
Anyway: I used to work for some place called "Emusic", but that was a long time ago and several buy-outs away. It could be that I'm biased, but I'm not sure which way.