He almost got it right
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
But what he failed to see is that while new distribution channels are opening up which allow profits to be made in the "tail", as he puts it, there is a parallel phenomena surrounding the creation of media. The same laws surrounding big business' approach to 'hits' in distribution--that scarce distribution channels require them to focus on a few titles which have a potential for big profits--apply to the creation of the media in the first place. No film or record company is going to produce and market a title with the potential to only hit a small niche market, even if it will find that market spot on with the likes of iTunes or Netflix. At least, no media company that operates under a traditional model.
He states "That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do.". But just as new technology is opening up new avanues for media distribution, it's giving us completely new ways to produce and market that media. A band can now cut an album and put it online using inexpensive equipment. A good band can now get promoted online through word of mouth. No need for expensive A&R men, no need for payola on the radio, no need for any of the services traditionally provided by the record companies. As technology gets better, the film industry is being changed too. A special effect CGI that cost millions to do just 15 years ago can now be accomplished on a desktop computer.
The point is, just as changes in technology are changing the economics of distribution, they are changing the economics of media manufacture and promotion. This is a great thing.
I do hope the folks are Real are reading this. It's not that everyone has decided that Real is the bitch d'jour and are picking on them. There are good, solid reasons why it's hated, as the parent of this thread pointed out.
It's so very simple: Don't invade your users privacy. Don't put together a 'free' client that is intrusive. Don't make it so difficult to find that free client.
There is money to be made in this. You can still pull out of this. But saying "look at us! We've got a new client" that doesn't really address the problems users in the past have with you won't make things better.
How else are they supposed to pay for the development of their media player?
It's called selling on the server end.
It's a pretty good business model, so as long as you don't piss off your customers on the client end so much that everyone hates you, and nobody wants to buy your server product because you suck.
(I'm not a fan of real. They could have made money in the long run, but threw it all away for the quick buck.)
I think your theory has something to it. In 98-02 I downloaded music like crazy . . . and purchased the music to the tune of 5-10 CDs a month.
I've not purchased a new CD for myself in the past year, partially because of a personal boycot of the music industry, but also because I have a pretty impressive collection and it's difficult to justify spending more cash when you have so much.
I would probably go out and spend some more money if there was something new and interesting out there, but I just can't find it, at least through conventional channels. I do try every once in a while, and tune the radio to a 'new' music station (as opposed to the usual staple of NPR or classic rock), but it all seems so bland.
I still download songs on occasion, but at the moment it's usually singles I remember from my high school days. As a side note, the Baby Got Back mp3 has been getting more play at my parties and in my car then I would think. After all this time, it's still a rocking song. . . usually followed by Run DMC's "It's Tricky"
The worse part about all of this is that they had a technology there that could be used effectively and to the benefit of both companies and consumers. Advertising on the Internet is a given, and unless somebody figures out a better way to make a profit on otherwise "free" Internet sites, it's here to stay.
Personally, I don't see a problem with the idea that if I have to see advertising it would at least be tailored to my interests. If that means that an anonymous profile is put together on my Internet habits and that information is used to custom direct an ad towards me, then hey, why not.
What I do have is a problem with the way the industry has chosen to approach this. Instead of asking me weather or not I want to have my Internet movement tracked, they do it covertly. They either use cookies which I didn't expressly give them permission to use, or worse hidden in software which at best asks my "permission" by hiding the true nature of the software deep in the fine print of the EULA.
For me, this has ultimately removed any sense of credibility and consumer confidence I might have in the industry. Between spam (which I don't want), pop-up ads (which are annoying to the point of being a major distraction), and Internet tracking spy-ware (where it is assumed that I want it unless I take great lengths to remove it), I've come to the conclusion that legitimate businesses simply don't advertise on the Internet.
Unobtrusive advertising, like a simple non-flashing or beeping generic banner ad is one thing. Hey, somebody who runs a website giving you content for "free" needs to pay the bills. But when it gets deeper--running software on my computer that I didn't want it to run or collecting personal information I don't want it to have--then it's reaching the point of being unacceptable.
If advertisers want to turn the industry around, they'd have to follow a few simple rules.
1: Ask my permission first. Make it abundantly clear, not hidden away somewhere. "We are going to track what websites you go to, in order to have custom tailored ads delivered on your page", or "We are going to send you e-mail about our products and services . . is that OK?". Always have 'no' selected by default. Make it so I have to go out of my way to get your advertising.
2: Make it easy for it to stop. If I have your software which reports back on my web usage on my computer and I don't want it there anymore, make it simple to uninstall it. Hiding parts of your software in different parts of the computer so it's nearly impossible to get rid of it is something virus writers do, not companies I want to do business with. If I tell you to take me off your e-mail list, that means stop right away.
There probably are companies dealing in Internet advertisement that follow those simple rules, but the problem is enough of them don't that it has made the entire Industry suspect, and at the present time I want nothing to do with them.
So what you're saying is, Bob the Dentist et. al. were making the decisions on weather or not to impliment QoS or ATM for IT network design?
That actually makes a lot of sense.
"Bill, we need to impliment an entirly new standard over our backbone. Let's call up marketing and have them do a focus group of a cross section of America."
"But the average Joe doesn't know anything about network architecture!"
You could probably just unscrew the antenna and put something that would block the radio signal, like some oddly shapped tin foil over the outside lead. That would probably be a quick way of "disabling" the wireless features.
I can see you're problem, but a quick look at the numbers show things a little different.
According to U.S. Census numbers, aprox 3.4 million people live in the greater Boston metro area, who presumably would gain a direct or indirect benifit from transport improvements in and into the city. Compare this with the total MA population, which sits at about 6.3 million, and you get about 54% of the state getting benifits from this.
When you consider housing prices and saleries (and corrisponding tax) are higher in the metro area then in more rural parts of the state, I'm not sure you're getting a raw deal.
In the triditional government model for US states, the tax burden to pay for rural infastructure falls primarly on the citys, not the other way around.
In other words, I doubt you're getting as badly screwed as you think.
The difference is, at the time Netscape did have a better product then IE. That changed with time, of course, but back in the late 90s it was the good guys vs. the bad.
I know this doesn't mean anything in the eyes of the law, but it just seems to be a waste to make MS pay out a lot of money to Real when they will just use it to prop up their crummy business model for a few more years.
These days, now that we've learned that the gee wiz of having something to do with computers isn't enough to spell success, there are a few very simple rules for doing business that I wish companies would learn.
1. Don't piss off your customers 2. Your product, perceived or otherwise, has to be better then your competitors.
Real follows neither of these rules, and this lawsuit appears to be nothing more then a last ditch effort to gain capital. It is a reality that if a company has no other business model then to offer an inferior product and expect customers to either pay for it or suffer egregious violations of their privacy, when they are a few mouse clicks away from something better that is free, that company will fail. It's just common sense.
Normally a company run with such a bad business model would die away without notice, but Real has entrenched itself on the server end with its proprietary format. They have this because they were one of the first (if not the first) to show up with streaming audio back in the day.
I can remember responding with amazement the first time I got streaming real audio. They were the first through the door and got the brand reconciliation, bringing organizations like NPR with them with this new technology. And they squandered it away. It's sad, but it's the real world (excuse the pun).
Unless Real can come up with a technology that bests the free alternatives in quality and does so without being intrusive to the users privacy or computer system, they will die, lawsuit or otherwise.
Not to disagree with you, but I for one could see how these would be useful in those examples:
Within a decade armies of tiny helicopter drones will monitor traffic, Humm... Cheaper than fixed cameras ? Even if the machines were cheap, that doesn't seem energy efficient, with fuel cost and all.
Fixed traffic cameras are a good start, but they can't always get to the root of a traffic problem because their number, and points of view are finite. A disabled vehicle may be causing a traffic problem, but it's difficult for traffic managers to act accordingly if the view of the problem is obscured by something . . . say, a large delivery truck. A flying autonomous robot would always be able to position itself for a view that would give the most accurate information of the problem.
inspect buildings for maintenance problems Cosmetic problems, that is. It is flying on the outside, after all. Doesn't seem to be more appealing than using binoculars or climbing a building across the street.
If I owned a large building, I'd much rather be paying for a small, relatively inexpensive robot to check basic exterior maintenance problems then pay for somebody who's only job was to climb around with a pair of binoculars. The robot could also check for things other then cosmetic problems: broken windows that are not reported, cracks in the structure, heck, even something that would notify me that the rain gutters are too mucked up and need to be cleaned.
map bushfires Although I am not familiar with the art of fighting bush fires, it seems to me that they propagate along a frontier line which is defined by the wind, so as long as you know about the wind, you can infer where the fire is going. So, it seems, these machines wouldn't add much.
I'm not too familiar with the nature of bush fires either, but I would suspect that the nature of the fires is subject to more variables then just the wind. Either way, there needs to be some way of verifying the position of the fire, and a small flying robot would be a lot cheaper (and in some cases faster) then a standard manned helicopter or airplane.
look for faults in powerlines This looks interesting, although (1) Not sure if that many faults are apparent (e.g. burnt transformer, loose cables) and (2) Isn't there remote sensing equipment that can already do that (e.g. reflecting waves in the cable?, or signaling from checkpoints ?)
Having survived a few storms that have downed power lines at the end (from the pole to the home), I know for a fact that the power company does nothing until reported. In addition, a downed pole could still be attached to a line that still functions. Power still goes through, but certainly not safe.
I do, however, like your ideas.
* Helicopter drones tracking suspect vehicles or individuals for police enforcement
Or even better, Helicopter drones operated by the news media. There is nothing worse then a swarm of news choppers flying above the police helicopter trying to cover some breaking incident. It's loud and annoying. I would suspect these things would be at least a little more quiet.
Though I'm not sure how much I'd like the media to have that sort of stealth reporting ability. I can only imagine what a paparazzi could do with one of those.
* Helicopter drones doing advertisement from the sky
That, sadly is going to happen irregardless of what technology comes out.
Yeah, because, you know, the only use of the Internet, or computers in general is to surf the web. The web is like, the Internet and vice versa. Chat, file transfers, command line interfaces, CD-Rom drives. ..those are all, like, the web you know?
On that note, I'm tired of all of this elitist jargon regarding travel in a vehicle. Everyone knows when you get an an airplane or get on a bus, it should be called 'riding the Interstate'.
And *I* will be lauging at all the Sci-Fi fanboys when they discover Europa is full of life consisting of very boring, male, unsexy insurance adjusters.
I'm sure we're not alone, we're just the most exciting folk in the galaxy.
I've seen that. It surprises me how many WAPs are unsecured. Big corperations, government agencies, homes. Schools seem to be pretty bad (not colleges, but high schools and elementary schools). As I've taught at many of these schools (and had permission to use their network), I would turn on the laptop and immediatly get an IP via DHCP and be online.
They set up one wireless access point with the SSID set to the default 'Linksys'.
And many, many miles away they turned on their windows machine, and voila! There it was, the WAP with the SSID 'Linksys', wide open just as they had left it!
Was I the only person who was a little uncomfortable with his evaluation of the music industry? To hear him tell it, the music industry has people whose job is to find 'successes'. Notice he didn't say find talented artists, or artists who people would like to listen to, but instead 'successes'.
Sure, the music industry makes no bones about the fact they are in it for the money, and nobody can blame them for that. But what gets me is how the industry is focused more on 'successes' (read: mega stars) then consistently signing good artists that would make them a consistent profit. Sign a dozen boy bands, or a dozen blonde bombshells, or a dozen hard core gangsta' rappers, or a dozen neo-metal bands . . . that all sound the same, spend millions on each of them, and then hope one of them sticks and puts up numbers like New Kids on the Block, J-lo, Ice-T or Korn.
It just seems that the recording industry is incapable of objectively evaluating quality in music, and instead is only able to evaluate potential 'success' insofar as an artist meets certain criteria in terms of marketability which has little to do with the actual music: Does the artist have the right look? Will the artist be able to give the impression of a certain 'lifestyle' key demographics are looking for? It's reached the point where the only difference between a country music star and a 'alternative' radio star is how long the artists hair is, and how much twang is added to the guitar track.
Music is--or at least should be--art. It's not wrong to make money from that art, but when your business model only works when art stops being a consideration and marketability becomes the only consideration, things start to fail. I almost get the impression that Jobs has a faint understanding of that; Stop throwing million dollar advances at countless sound-a-like bands and take the time to invest in unique individual artists, and perhaps the industry isn't doomed.
Yeah. But what if somebody who was trying to sell you a car told you that even though there was a 'feature' in that car that allowed you to effortlessly go 5 or 10 mph over the speed limit was "corrosive to your character"?
He may understand why you think there is nothing wrong with downloading mp3s, but he still will villify you because he thinks what your doing is stealing.
and there are very few people who have the hardware to play the movie on their tv's. Its not anywhere close to being there yet, check back in 10 years and we'll see where everything is at then
In some respects, we're already there; There are cheap or free utilities that will convert and burn mpeg movies to VCD format, allowing the large user base with CD-Rom burners to watch movies, albeit with reduced quality, on their home DVD players.
If we follow the path CD-Rom burners took from being an expensive toy to an intergral part of every computer system, and applied it to DVD burners, it seems that your 10 year mark is a little too far away.
In addition, most of your higher end graphics cards already include an S-video output, and more and more sound cards are able to decode 5.1 digital sound.
Either way, it's not unreasonable to think that by 2005, the distribution of high quality pirated movies will reach the same numbers as mp3 trading had in '99.
I can think of only one real practical use for something like this. At least for the voice conferencing feature. When out of town guests come, it's customary to get them all nice an boozed up. Then, usually about 3am everyone goes to sleep, and guest is left to their own devices on the couch.
At this point, the guest is usually quite drunk, and doesn't have his wits correctly about him. This is when you turn on the billy bass. The host could retire to the other room, start up the laptop with a microphone attached, run his voice through some sort of modifier, and have a great deal of fun with the guest.
The fish would spring to life. "You! Yes, you! What the devil do you think your doing?" Wait to hear a response. "Yes, you, (insert name of guest here). Don't think I haven't been watching you. I know what you're doing."
At this point the host can opt for a number of fun pranks to play on his guest. Everything from a fake spiritual revelation "You know very well that that attractive girlfriend is not a good match for you. It's a sham. Introduce her to your host. It will be good for your soul", to just good hyjinks "It's finally happened, my friend. You've gone insane".
You may have touched on something there with your reference to blue laws. Sometimes I can't help to think that in 100 years, when the equality issue has been delt with and every body has both the access to equality and the impression to equality, that history will look back at our current time with an unfriendly tone.
As a Californian, I don't like the laws. But the sad fact remains that there does exist inequality in this state and in this country. That's not me being a white liberal, that's me stating a fact. Now, at this point, minorities may be behind the curve due to economic reasons instead of some institutional 'racism' that so many pundents love to claim still exist.
There could be a number of reasons minorities are behind and feel they deserve special treatment. Personally, I think it has more to do with their own leadership then anything the big bad white boogyman imposes on them, but I can't say for sure.
What I can say is legislating to the point of insanity isn't the answer, and only helps preserve a system of double standards that doesn't help anybody.
p.s., I was an economics major, not a liberal arts major.
Rather then cop out and say it was a mistyping, it was both a mistake about Spanish thinking it was the same as French, and also a mistake about the nature of French. Learning from our mistakes is what makes life great, even if your mistakes make you sound like an idiot.
Also, I think Los Angeles county should ban the French language.
I heard your cry, and being a man of action, did something about it. Opening up my computer case, I switched the jumper cables. Now the master is the slave, and vice versa.
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But what he failed to see is that while new distribution channels are opening up which allow profits to be made in the "tail", as he puts it, there is a parallel phenomena surrounding the creation of media. The same laws surrounding big business' approach to 'hits' in distribution--that scarce distribution channels require them to focus on a few titles which have a potential for big profits--apply to the creation of the media in the first place. No film or record company is going to produce and market a title with the potential to only hit a small niche market, even if it will find that market spot on with the likes of iTunes or Netflix. At least, no media company that operates under a traditional model.
He states "That leaves the costs of finding, making, and marketing music. Keep them as they are, to ensure that the people on the creative and label side of the business make as much as they currently do.". But just as new technology is opening up new avanues for media distribution, it's giving us completely new ways to produce and market that media. A band can now cut an album and put it online using inexpensive equipment. A good band can now get promoted online through word of mouth. No need for expensive A&R men, no need for payola on the radio, no need for any of the services traditionally provided by the record companies. As technology gets better, the film industry is being changed too. A special effect CGI that cost millions to do just 15 years ago can now be accomplished on a desktop computer.
The point is, just as changes in technology are changing the economics of distribution, they are changing the economics of media manufacture and promotion. This is a great thing.
I do hope the folks are Real are reading this. It's not that everyone has decided that Real is the bitch d'jour and are picking on them. There are good, solid reasons why it's hated, as the parent of this thread pointed out.
It's so very simple: Don't invade your users privacy. Don't put together a 'free' client that is intrusive. Don't make it so difficult to find that free client.
There is money to be made in this. You can still pull out of this. But saying "look at us! We've got a new client" that doesn't really address the problems users in the past have with you won't make things better.
How else are they supposed to pay for the development of their media player?
It's called selling on the server end.
It's a pretty good business model, so as long as you don't piss off your customers on the client end so much that everyone hates you, and nobody wants to buy your server product because you suck.
(I'm not a fan of real. They could have made money in the long run, but threw it all away for the quick buck.)
Get ready to be saying "The U.S. is at war with Iran. The U.S. has always been at war with Iran."
I think your theory has something to it. In 98-02 I downloaded music like crazy . . . and purchased the music to the tune of 5-10 CDs a month.
I've not purchased a new CD for myself in the past year, partially because of a personal boycot of the music industry, but also because I have a pretty impressive collection and it's difficult to justify spending more cash when you have so much.
I would probably go out and spend some more money if there was something new and interesting out there, but I just can't find it, at least through conventional channels. I do try every once in a while, and tune the radio to a 'new' music station (as opposed to the usual staple of NPR or classic rock), but it all seems so bland.
I still download songs on occasion, but at the moment it's usually singles I remember from my high school days. As a side note, the Baby Got Back mp3 has been getting more play at my parties and in my car then I would think. After all this time, it's still a rocking song. . . usually followed by Run DMC's "It's Tricky"
The worse part about all of this is that they had a technology there that could be used effectively and to the benefit of both companies and consumers. Advertising on the Internet is a given, and unless somebody figures out a better way to make a profit on otherwise "free" Internet sites, it's here to stay.
Personally, I don't see a problem with the idea that if I have to see advertising it would at least be tailored to my interests. If that means that an anonymous profile is put together on my Internet habits and that information is used to custom direct an ad towards me, then hey, why not.
What I do have is a problem with the way the industry has chosen to approach this. Instead of asking me weather or not I want to have my Internet movement tracked, they do it covertly. They either use cookies which I didn't expressly give them permission to use, or worse hidden in software which at best asks my "permission" by hiding the true nature of the software deep in the fine print of the EULA.
For me, this has ultimately removed any sense of credibility and consumer confidence I might have in the industry. Between spam (which I don't want), pop-up ads (which are annoying to the point of being a major distraction), and Internet tracking spy-ware (where it is assumed that I want it unless I take great lengths to remove it), I've come to the conclusion that legitimate businesses simply don't advertise on the Internet.
Unobtrusive advertising, like a simple non-flashing or beeping generic banner ad is one thing. Hey, somebody who runs a website giving you content for "free" needs to pay the bills. But when it gets deeper--running software on my computer that I didn't want it to run or collecting personal information I don't want it to have--then it's reaching the point of being unacceptable.
If advertisers want to turn the industry around, they'd have to follow a few simple rules.
1: Ask my permission first. Make it abundantly clear, not hidden away somewhere. "We are going to track what websites you go to, in order to have custom tailored ads delivered on your page", or "We are going to send you e-mail about our products and services . . is that OK?". Always have 'no' selected by default. Make it so I have to go out of my way to get your advertising.
2: Make it easy for it to stop. If I have your software which reports back on my web usage on my computer and I don't want it there anymore, make it simple to uninstall it. Hiding parts of your software in different parts of the computer so it's nearly impossible to get rid of it is something virus writers do, not companies I want to do business with. If I tell you to take me off your e-mail list, that means stop right away.
There probably are companies dealing in Internet advertisement that follow those simple rules, but the problem is enough of them don't that it has made the entire Industry suspect, and at the present time I want nothing to do with them.
So what you're saying is, Bob the Dentist et. al. were making the decisions on weather or not to impliment QoS or ATM for IT network design?
That actually makes a lot of sense.
"Bill, we need to impliment an entirly new standard over our backbone. Let's call up marketing and have them do a focus group of a cross section of America."
"But the average Joe doesn't know anything about network architecture!"
"You don't want to keep your job, do you Bill"
You could probably just unscrew the antenna and put something that would block the radio signal, like some oddly shapped tin foil over the outside lead. That would probably be a quick way of "disabling" the wireless features.
I can see you're problem, but a quick look at the numbers show things a little different.
According to U.S. Census numbers, aprox 3.4 million people live in the greater Boston metro area, who presumably would gain a direct or indirect benifit from transport improvements in and into the city. Compare this with the total MA population, which sits at about 6.3 million, and you get about 54% of the state getting benifits from this.
When you consider housing prices and saleries (and corrisponding tax) are higher in the metro area then in more rural parts of the state, I'm not sure you're getting a raw deal.
In the triditional government model for US states, the tax burden to pay for rural infastructure falls primarly on the citys, not the other way around.
In other words, I doubt you're getting as badly screwed as you think.
Shhhhh!!!!
A community might have an opinion about movies. Heavens!
Let's leave it up to the critics, they know what's best. It's better that way.
The next thing you know, they will be asking the man on the street what movie he or she liked. What horror!
The difference is, at the time Netscape did have a better product then IE. That changed with time, of course, but back in the late 90s it was the good guys vs. the bad.
I know this doesn't mean anything in the eyes of the law, but it just seems to be a waste to make MS pay out a lot of money to Real when they will just use it to prop up their crummy business model for a few more years.
These days, now that we've learned that the gee wiz of having something to do with computers isn't enough to spell success, there are a few very simple rules for doing business that I wish companies would learn.
1. Don't piss off your customers
2. Your product, perceived or otherwise, has to be better then your competitors.
Real follows neither of these rules, and this lawsuit appears to be nothing more then a last ditch effort to gain capital. It is a reality that if a company has no other business model then to offer an inferior product and expect customers to either pay for it or suffer egregious violations of their privacy, when they are a few mouse clicks away from something better that is free, that company will fail. It's just common sense.
Normally a company run with such a bad business model would die away without notice, but Real has entrenched itself on the server end with its proprietary format. They have this because they were one of the first (if not the first) to show up with streaming audio back in the day.
I can remember responding with amazement the first time I got streaming real audio. They were the first through the door and got the brand reconciliation, bringing organizations like NPR with them with this new technology. And they squandered it away. It's sad, but it's the real world (excuse the pun).
Unless Real can come up with a technology that bests the free alternatives in quality and does so without being intrusive to the users privacy or computer system, they will die, lawsuit or otherwise.
Not to disagree with you, but I for one could see how these would be useful in those examples:
Within a decade armies of tiny helicopter drones will monitor traffic,
Humm... Cheaper than fixed cameras ? Even if the machines were cheap, that doesn't seem energy efficient, with fuel cost and all.
Fixed traffic cameras are a good start, but they can't always get to the root of a traffic problem because their number, and points of view are finite. A disabled vehicle may be causing a traffic problem, but it's difficult for traffic managers to act accordingly if the view of the problem is obscured by something . . . say, a large delivery truck. A flying autonomous robot would always be able to position itself for a view that would give the most accurate information of the problem.
inspect buildings for maintenance problems
Cosmetic problems, that is. It is flying on the outside, after all. Doesn't seem to be more appealing than using binoculars or climbing a building across the street.
If I owned a large building, I'd much rather be paying for a small, relatively inexpensive robot to check basic exterior maintenance problems then pay for somebody who's only job was to climb around with a pair of binoculars. The robot could also check for things other then cosmetic problems: broken windows that are not reported, cracks in the structure, heck, even something that would notify me that the rain gutters are too mucked up and need to be cleaned.
map bushfires
Although I am not familiar with the art of fighting bush fires, it seems to me that they propagate along a frontier line which is defined by the wind, so as long as you know about the wind, you can infer where the fire is going. So, it seems, these machines wouldn't add much.
I'm not too familiar with the nature of bush fires either, but I would suspect that the nature of the fires is subject to more variables then just the wind. Either way, there needs to be some way of verifying the position of the fire, and a small flying robot would be a lot cheaper (and in some cases faster) then a standard manned helicopter or airplane.
look for faults in powerlines
This looks interesting, although (1) Not sure if that many faults are apparent (e.g. burnt transformer, loose cables) and (2) Isn't there remote sensing equipment that can already do that (e.g. reflecting waves in the cable?, or signaling from checkpoints ?)
Having survived a few storms that have downed power lines at the end (from the pole to the home), I know for a fact that the power company does nothing until reported. In addition, a downed pole could still be attached to a line that still functions. Power still goes through, but certainly not safe.
I do, however, like your ideas.
* Helicopter drones tracking suspect vehicles or individuals for police enforcement
Or even better, Helicopter drones operated by the news media. There is nothing worse then a swarm of news choppers flying above the police helicopter trying to cover some breaking incident. It's loud and annoying. I would suspect these things would be at least a little more quiet.
Though I'm not sure how much I'd like the media to have that sort of stealth reporting ability. I can only imagine what a paparazzi could do with one of those.
* Helicopter drones doing advertisement from the sky
That, sadly is going to happen irregardless of what technology comes out.
Yeah, because, you know, the only use of the Internet, or computers in general is to surf the web. The web is like, the Internet and vice versa. Chat, file transfers, command line interfaces, CD-Rom drives. . .those are all, like, the web you know?
On that note, I'm tired of all of this elitist jargon regarding travel in a vehicle. Everyone knows when you get an an airplane or get on a bus, it should be called 'riding the Interstate'.
And *I* will be lauging at all the Sci-Fi fanboys when they discover Europa is full of life consisting of very boring, male, unsexy insurance adjusters.
I'm sure we're not alone, we're just the most exciting folk in the galaxy.
I've seen that. It surprises me how many WAPs are unsecured. Big corperations, government agencies, homes. Schools seem to be pretty bad (not colleges, but high schools and elementary schools). As I've taught at many of these schools (and had permission to use their network), I would turn on the laptop and immediatly get an IP via DHCP and be online.
Simply amazing.
They set up one wireless access point with the SSID set to the default 'Linksys'.
And many, many miles away they turned on their windows machine, and voila! There it was, the WAP with the SSID 'Linksys', wide open just as they had left it!
Was I the only person who was a little uncomfortable with his evaluation of the music industry? To hear him tell it, the music industry has people whose job is to find 'successes'. Notice he didn't say find talented artists, or artists who people would like to listen to, but instead 'successes'.
Sure, the music industry makes no bones about the fact they are in it for the money, and nobody can blame them for that. But what gets me is how the industry is focused more on 'successes' (read: mega stars) then consistently signing good artists that would make them a consistent profit. Sign a dozen boy bands, or a dozen blonde bombshells, or a dozen hard core gangsta' rappers, or a dozen neo-metal bands . . . that all sound the same, spend millions on each of them, and then hope one of them sticks and puts up numbers like New Kids on the Block, J-lo, Ice-T or Korn.
It just seems that the recording industry is incapable of objectively evaluating quality in music, and instead is only able to evaluate potential 'success' insofar as an artist meets certain criteria in terms of marketability which has little to do with the actual music: Does the artist have the right look? Will the artist be able to give the impression of a certain 'lifestyle' key demographics are looking for? It's reached the point where the only difference between a country music star and a 'alternative' radio star is how long the artists hair is, and how much twang is added to the guitar track.
Music is--or at least should be--art. It's not wrong to make money from that art, but when your business model only works when art stops being a consideration and marketability becomes the only consideration, things start to fail. I almost get the impression that Jobs has a faint understanding of that; Stop throwing million dollar advances at countless sound-a-like bands and take the time to invest in unique individual artists, and perhaps the industry isn't doomed.
Yeah. But what if somebody who was trying to sell you a car told you that even though there was a 'feature' in that car that allowed you to effortlessly go 5 or 10 mph over the speed limit was "corrosive to your character"?
He may understand why you think there is nothing wrong with downloading mp3s, but he still will villify you because he thinks what your doing is stealing.
and there are very few people who have the hardware to play the movie on their tv's. Its not anywhere close to being there yet, check back in 10 years and we'll see where everything is at then
In some respects, we're already there; There are cheap or free utilities that will convert and burn mpeg movies to VCD format, allowing the large user base with CD-Rom burners to watch movies, albeit with reduced quality, on their home DVD players.
If we follow the path CD-Rom burners took from being an expensive toy to an intergral part of every computer system, and applied it to DVD burners, it seems that your 10 year mark is a little too far away.
In addition, most of your higher end graphics cards already include an S-video output, and more and more sound cards are able to decode 5.1 digital sound.
Either way, it's not unreasonable to think that by 2005, the distribution of high quality pirated movies will reach the same numbers as mp3 trading had in '99.
Set the wayback machine for 25 years ago or so. I remember some guy came to our elementary school and showed us moon rocks. I was impressed.
I mean, those rocks came from the freekin moon!
Good luck to the winner of that auction.
I can think of only one real practical use for something like this. At least for the voice conferencing feature. When out of town guests come, it's customary to get them all nice an boozed up. Then, usually about 3am everyone goes to sleep, and guest is left to their own devices on the couch.
At this point, the guest is usually quite drunk, and doesn't have his wits correctly about him. This is when you turn on the billy bass. The host could retire to the other room, start up the laptop with a microphone attached, run his voice through some sort of modifier, and have a great deal of fun with the guest.
The fish would spring to life. "You! Yes, you! What the devil do you think your doing?" Wait to hear a response. "Yes, you, (insert name of guest here). Don't think I haven't been watching you. I know what you're doing."
At this point the host can opt for a number of fun pranks to play on his guest. Everything from a fake spiritual revelation "You know very well that that attractive girlfriend is not a good match for you. It's a sham. Introduce her to your host. It will be good for your soul", to just good hyjinks "It's finally happened, my friend. You've gone insane".
Ahh, what good times could be had.
You may have touched on something there with your reference to blue laws. Sometimes I can't help to think that in 100 years, when the equality issue has been delt with and every body has both the access to equality and the impression to equality, that history will look back at our current time with an unfriendly tone.
As a Californian, I don't like the laws. But the sad fact remains that there does exist inequality in this state and in this country. That's not me being a white liberal, that's me stating a fact. Now, at this point, minorities may be behind the curve due to economic reasons instead of some institutional 'racism' that so many pundents love to claim still exist.
There could be a number of reasons minorities are behind and feel they deserve special treatment. Personally, I think it has more to do with their own leadership then anything the big bad white boogyman imposes on them, but I can't say for sure.
What I can say is legislating to the point of insanity isn't the answer, and only helps preserve a system of double standards that doesn't help anybody.
p.s., I was an economics major, not a liberal arts major.
Rather then cop out and say it was a mistyping, it was both a mistake about Spanish thinking it was the same as French, and also a mistake about the nature of French. Learning from our mistakes is what makes life great, even if your mistakes make you sound like an idiot.
Also, I think Los Angeles county should ban the French language.
I heard your cry, and being a man of action, did something about it. Opening up my computer case, I switched the jumper cables. Now the master is the slave, and vice versa.
Whoa-ho! The tables have turned!
Viva La Revolution!