If you've never actually seen the latest version of Newton handwring recognition in action, take a look here under Newton Usability. "Eat up Martha", my ass. Makes Graffiti look like the kludgy hack it is.
Apple got everything right with the Newton except the size. What a foolish mistake they made cancelling it as a product instead of redesigning it in a slightly smaller form factor.
I'd love to see an open source project that integrates OpenCyc into an interactive fiction programming suite.
The primary benefit I see in doing this is that instead of requiring users to complete excruciatingly specific chains of actions to achieve a goal, programmers could set goalstates and let the creativity of their players run wild trying to achieve them. OpenCyc's inference engine should be able to determine whether the goalstate was achieved or not, based on the properties of the objects.
This would, of course, make for an entirely different interactive fiction experience. Up until now, interactive fiction programming has focused on creating intuitive but nonobvious chains of reasoning and rewarding the player for discovering these sequences. Goal-based interactive fiction would place a greater focus on designing situations based on the properties of your objects. For example:
The Guard Room is filled with weapons. There are several shotguns mounted on the wall, next to a cabinet full of ammo. There is a filing cabinet in the corner, and a map of the prison on the wall.
There is a desk here with a phone, a lamp, a letter opener, and guard who seems to have fallen asleep while doing paperwork. It's Jimmy. The nice guard. Poor kid. You feel bad that he has to die so you can be free.
In a normal IF game, there would be one preferred way to solve this problem. Perhaps two, if the author felt especially creative. But an OpenCyc enabled game would let you examine the room in increasing detail, and use any and all of the objects you find to achieve the goal of incapacitating Jimmy.
Instead of being required to, say, grab a gun from the shotgun rack and shoot Jimmy in order to move past him, you might decide electrocuting Jimmy is quieter and smarter:
> get letter opener from desk.
Taken. Jimmy snores quietly but does not budge.
> cut lamp cord with letter opener
You are electrocuted. You have died.
Oops. OpenCyc knew that the letter opener was metal and that the lamp cord was plugged in, and that a human being could be electrocuted by doing this. Next time you unplug the lamp before cutting the cord and electrocuting Jimmy. Or maybe you tie him up with the lamp cord, and don't kill him. Your choice.
What makes this style of gameplay especially intriguing is that solutions could emerge which would surprise the author. It might even be fun to create situations which have no immediate solution and see if, through clever introspection, one might not emerge. Sharing your unique solutions with others would be part of the fun of playing the game.
By building on OpenCyc, the effort one programmer takes to define objects could be used and amplified by other authors. It could perhaps even be used by the general OpenCyc community in other applications. If nothing else, the challenge of trying to create a goal-based interactive fiction language that was powered by a common-sense inference engine like OpenCyc would be a heck of a lot of fun.
I initially thought you made a good point, but then I thought about the iPod as hard drive. Many cellphones and PDAs (like the Sony Clies) are camera enabled and can record video. Unfortunately, there's not much RAM to put it in, so your recording time is limited.
As cellphone and PDA cameras of the future increase in resolution and quality, it makes sense to record wirelessly to your iPod instead of PDA RAM. (Of course, the Wireless USB standard makes more sense for this use than Bluetooth, but it's a still a reasonable argument for wanting wirelessly capable iPods.)
Consumers who are choosing Linux aren't choosing it over OS X, they're choosing it over Windows. Most aren't even considering OS X because it's too pricey for them at this point in their lives. But abandoning Windows primes them to become OS X users down the road, when they become successful enough to see value in trading money for features, ease of use, and status. In essence, Linux creates a feeder program for future OS X users.
I see Linux growing tremendously in the future, as it replaces Windows as the dominant desktop OS. And I see OS X growing significantly in the future, as mature Linux users migrate to it. In between the two, I see Windows slowly being squeezed out of existence, too expensive to compete with Linux, too buggy, insecure, and inelegant to compete with OS X.
Considering how tame our microwave ovens are and how often we use them, I'm surprised so many people are so terrified of them. Here's a follow up article that explains microwave intensity a little better:
Will the microwave beams "cook" humans and animals?
No. This common concern arises from the everyday use of microwave ovens. Microwave power in an oven has five times or more the intensity of noon sunlight. Power beams can operate at, or less than, one-fifth of the intensity of sunlight or 4% of the intensity in a microwave oven. In addition, the tightly confined beams are directed to receivers, termed rectennas, erected several meters above restricted and fenced industrial zones. Beams can be turned off in a few seconds for unusual conditions. Outside the fenced area and under the rectennas, the microwave intensity will be far less than that allowed for continuous exposure of the general population.
If you don't trust science, you can verify this for yourself by trying to cook a whole turkey in the microwave.
Get a 9 lb. turkey, put it in your microwave, and turn the microwave on high for several minutes. Now take out your turkey. Is it burnt to a crisp? Why... no. It's not even warm yet. (Remember, these microwaves are 25 times more intense than those being beamed back from the Moon.)
What's sort of funny and sort of sad is that people panic over the idea of microwave power, while remaining completely apathetic about the deadly cancers coal-generating plants produce.
Breathing in coal particulates kills people. Carbon from coal may even be catastrophically altering the climactic balance of our entire planet. (Global warming, anyone?) But some would rather kill people and even ruin the entire planet than deal with scary, harmless microwaves. Think about all that next time someone on Slashdot writes another "cooked city" post.:^)
Not really. Solar bases are built on both sides of the Moon, and satellites are used to relay microwave transmissions to areas not currently in line-of-sight. It's in the article.
You need to put in as much energy into the creation of the H2 as you will later get out. Creating H2 costs as much energy as you get back later.
That's exactly why we want to switch from fossil fuels to hydrogen. You're right that hydrogen isn't an energy source. It's an energy storage medium. And the fact that it's such an efficient storage medium is why we want to switch to it.
So all a hydrogen car will do will move the source of pollution from the car to the power plant.
Fuel cells are about twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. We have to generate the energy ourselves, of course, but as an energy storage medium hydrogen has huge advantages over fossil fuels and chemical batteries.
The beautiful thing about electrolyzing water to get hydrogen is that we can use any number of generation methods to do so. We'll start by ramping up the economy using fossil fuels, of course, but gradually move to wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and increased nuclear. Eventually, I'm sure, we'll end up getting most of our energy from some sort of space solar solution, but that may be a while.
In the meantime, the hydrogen economy will enable us to become vastly more flexible in how we acquire the energy to run our society, and to use energy more efficiently. Barring a series of quantum leaps in battery technology, it's really the only way to go.
I'm no expert, but certainly lunar solar power would eliminate one of the biggest factors potentially altering Earth's albedo: the gases and particulates released from fossil fuel combustion. I can't see any negative effect in some thousandths-of-a-percent change to the Moon's albedo that wouldn't be dwarfed by this benefit.
I've seen several articles about the Moon's He3 resources, but almost none about the Moon's even greater potential as a source of solar power. According to an article by Dr. David Criswell, Director of the Institute for Space Systems Operations at the University of Houston:
The surface of Earth's moon receives 12,000 TW of absolutely predictable solar power. The LSP System uses 10 to 20 pairs of bases to collect on the order of 1% of the solar power reaching the lunar surface. The collected sunlight is converted to many low-intensity beams of microwaves and directed to rectennas on Earth. Each rectenna converts the microwave power to electricity that is fed into the local electric grid. The system could easily deliver the 20 TW or more of electric power required by 10 billion people. Adequate knowledge of the moon and practical technologies have been available since the late 1970s to collect this power and beam it to Earth.
Also, a manned lunar base would be the first step toward implementing a lunar solar power system, one of the only viable candidates for replacing the energy we get from cheap oil today.
First, BitPass uses a pre-paid card model, so there's only one charge on your credit card, the charge for buying the card itself. No individual transactions are listed. Your wife isn't going to know you're looking at micropayment pr0n, if that's what you're afraid of.
Second, the internet has no privacy in the first place. There are IP logs and traffic sniffers galore out there. If you want total privacy, stay off the internet and build yourself a cabin in Montana.
It didn't bash or hype micropayments, just described them as useful in certain situations for certain individuals or businesses. Which is the truth. (Although can I just say that I hate the word monetize? As in, "This allows us to monetize our content." I don't want to buy anything from anyone who monetizes. Please, just use "sell".)
The study just compared caffeinated coffee drinkers to non-coffee drinkers. Maybe those non-coffee drinkers were drinking 12-paks of Mountain Dew. Jumping to conclusions is bad science.
The DVD is made of silica glass rather than plastic so that it can withstand the high temperatures necessary to sterilize it of Earth microbes before it is sent to the Martian surface. Also, the silica glass has a much longer lifetime than typical commercial DVDs--in fact, the silica glass DVD could last more than 500 years. The DVD will remain on the lander as a time capsule for a future generation.
The DVD assembly's base, the simulated LEGO bricks, and the central oval are made of machined and anodized aluminum. The aluminum parts are separated from the silica glass DVD with Delrin pads. Delrin is an inflexible polymer that is very tough and heat resistant.
The entire assembly, which weighs 69 grams, has been subjected to a battery of tests designed to simulate the extreme environmental conditions of the journey to Mars: temperature cycling from 125 to 60 degrees Celsius, exposure to vacuum, high-speed random vibration, and shocks of 4,000 times the acceleration of Earth's gravity.
First off, congratulations to everyone at NASA and JPL! The landing went off like clockwork. You should be proud. I know I am.
But NASA TV... you blew it. Again.
Here you have this tremendous opportunity to involve Americans young and old with the space program, to get them excited and emotionally invested in space exploration, and what do you do? You show us video of the control room.... with the sound off. You let us in on what the Flight Director is saying, but you don't decode it for the average viewer so they know what it means. You make landing on another freaking planet more boring than most cable access shows. Take a bow.
You didn't even start your coverage until an hour before landing. If you had any vision, you could've made a whole day of it. You could've made it an event. Fuck Survivor, you've got the ultimate reality show! You should've had the whole nation tuned in. Instead they watched a repeat of MAD TV.
NASA TV, wake up! You should be kicking the Sci-Fi channel's ass. Really. I expect more from you in the future.
I know one of the reasons they created BOINC is that the current SETI@home clientbase is very rigid and can only process data from one telescope -- Aricebo. I also know that the commandline client is tons faster than the screensaver-based client. Is BOINC's flexiblity going to end up making BOINC clients slower than the current dedicated clients?
If iTunes ends up dominating the online music market, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of their competitors sue them for predatory pricing, an anticompetitive practice which is illegal under U.S. antitrust laws. I doubt they'd win, but one never knows.
Who said anything about streaming? Streaming is wasteful and pointless for anything but live video. Even with a cut in download speed, your customers are still going to get the video way faster than USPS, and it's still going to be cheaper for you, too.
It is cheaper for me to deliver it by mail on a DVD than to offer it for download.
How do you figure?
Bandwidth is around $2 a gig, at least it is with my web host. Your movie is presumably less than a gig. You said it's a short movie, but let's be charitable and call it 500 megs. 500 megs should set you back about $1.
So why not charge $1.50 for the video online and make 50 cents each time someone downloads it? If it's good, charge a little more, like these guys are doing.
Just wondering how you decided that you couldn't make a profit by distributing online, considering some people already are.
They're not mutually exclusive, though. Any content seller can offer their content both via subscription and micropayments. Buying ala carte may be the step that eventually convinces a user to subscribe.
If I'd known responses to Clay Shirky's article would get their own thread, I would've waited. Here's a crosspost of my original response.
By way of setting up a straw man, Shirky asks: "Would you pay 25 cents to view a VR panorama of the Matterhorn?" As if one's personal preference for Matterhorn photography had anything to do with the success or failure of micropayments.
Make no mistake; like ALL business ventures, some people will fail with micropayments. Some will fail because they didn't know how to market their product, or because they set their prices too high or too low. But so what? That's endemic to capitalism, not just micropayments. Just because Crystal Pepsi failed doesn't mean capitalism itself is a failure. Engaging in these kind of arguments is a beginner's mistake, and most of Shirky's thoughts on micropayments surprisingly and unfortunately exhibit this same kind of sloppy thinking.
His "mental transaction costs" argument, for example, is predicated on users being forced to engage in one or two cent transactions every time they want to view a page. But most micro advocates have abandoned this line of thought. The idea of charging a penny-per-page is history. What they want in the 21st century is the ability to sell their products -- songs and webcomics, mostly -- at a fair price. And micropayments enable them to do that. Shirky endlessly flogs the dead horse penny-a-page model, but conveniently ignores the 99-cents-a-song model that's made iTunes Music Store such a success.
Scott McCloud himself writes that 1,354 readers bought Part One of "The Right Number" at 25 cents a pop. Considering that he was the very first BitPass seller ever, and that everyone who wanted to see his comic had to go through the effort of signing up for BitPass, that's remarkable, and worth talking about. It certainly flies in the face of Shirky's assertion that consumers on the internet are so lazy and indiscriminate in their tastes that they'll bolt to free content at the first opportunity. Scott's readers had to not only pay, but go through the effort of risking $3 signing up for a new, untested service. Scott's experience demonstrates that failure to get people to pay for your product has everything to do with your relationship to your audience and nothing to do with micropayments. But Shirky ignores it all the same.
Finally, Shirky's views on micropayments completely fail to address the idea that micropayments can work with other forms of payment, such as subscriptions or bundling, instead of replacing them. Buying content ala carte may be the step that convinces you to subscribe to a site, for example. Micropayments aren't an either/or, they're an and. One more choice, not one less. And of course, micropayments can work exceptionally well alongside free content. Any public television pledge drive shows this principle in action; even small tchotchkes can induce many people to donate. Any thoughtful analysis of the future of micropayments ought to examine this phenomenon, but Shirky doesn't.
In some ways, it's nice to see that Shirky hasn't changed his tune. At least he's willing to go down with the ship. But his analysis is -- by any standard -- unbelievably shallow. As the market for micropayment content increases, it will be interesting to see how he tries to spin reality.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've never actually seen the latest version of Newton handwring recognition in action, take a look here under Newton Usability. "Eat up Martha", my ass. Makes Graffiti look like the kludgy hack it is.
And did you know you can sync your Newton with iTunes wirelessly? Even the latest iPod can't do that.
Apple got everything right with the Newton except the size. What a foolish mistake they made cancelling it as a product instead of redesigning it in a slightly smaller form factor.
The primary benefit I see in doing this is that instead of requiring users to complete excruciatingly specific chains of actions to achieve a goal, programmers could set goalstates and let the creativity of their players run wild trying to achieve them. OpenCyc's inference engine should be able to determine whether the goalstate was achieved or not, based on the properties of the objects.
This would, of course, make for an entirely different interactive fiction experience. Up until now, interactive fiction programming has focused on creating intuitive but nonobvious chains of reasoning and rewarding the player for discovering these sequences. Goal-based interactive fiction would place a greater focus on designing situations based on the properties of your objects. For example:
In a normal IF game, there would be one preferred way to solve this problem. Perhaps two, if the author felt especially creative. But an OpenCyc enabled game would let you examine the room in increasing detail, and use any and all of the objects you find to achieve the goal of incapacitating Jimmy.
Instead of being required to, say, grab a gun from the shotgun rack and shoot Jimmy in order to move past him, you might decide electrocuting Jimmy is quieter and smarter:
Oops. OpenCyc knew that the letter opener was metal and that the lamp cord was plugged in, and that a human being could be electrocuted by doing this. Next time you unplug the lamp before cutting the cord and electrocuting Jimmy. Or maybe you tie him up with the lamp cord, and don't kill him. Your choice.
What makes this style of gameplay especially intriguing is that solutions could emerge which would surprise the author. It might even be fun to create situations which have no immediate solution and see if, through clever introspection, one might not emerge. Sharing your unique solutions with others would be part of the fun of playing the game.
By building on OpenCyc, the effort one programmer takes to define objects could be used and amplified by other authors. It could perhaps even be used by the general OpenCyc community in other applications. If nothing else, the challenge of trying to create a goal-based interactive fiction language that was powered by a common-sense inference engine like OpenCyc would be a heck of a lot of fun.
I initially thought you made a good point, but then I thought about the iPod as hard drive. Many cellphones and PDAs (like the Sony Clies) are camera enabled and can record video. Unfortunately, there's not much RAM to put it in, so your recording time is limited.
As cellphone and PDA cameras of the future increase in resolution and quality, it makes sense to record wirelessly to your iPod instead of PDA RAM. (Of course, the Wireless USB standard makes more sense for this use than Bluetooth, but it's a still a reasonable argument for wanting wirelessly capable iPods.)
Consumers who are choosing Linux aren't choosing it over OS X, they're choosing it over Windows. Most aren't even considering OS X because it's too pricey for them at this point in their lives. But abandoning Windows primes them to become OS X users down the road, when they become successful enough to see value in trading money for features, ease of use, and status. In essence, Linux creates a feeder program for future OS X users.
I see Linux growing tremendously in the future, as it replaces Windows as the dominant desktop OS. And I see OS X growing significantly in the future, as mature Linux users migrate to it. In between the two, I see Windows slowly being squeezed out of existence, too expensive to compete with Linux, too buggy, insecure, and inelegant to compete with OS X.
If you don't trust science, you can verify this for yourself by trying to cook a whole turkey in the microwave.
Get a 9 lb. turkey, put it in your microwave, and turn the microwave on high for several minutes. Now take out your turkey. Is it burnt to a crisp? Why... no. It's not even warm yet. (Remember, these microwaves are 25 times more intense than those being beamed back from the Moon.)
What's sort of funny and sort of sad is that people panic over the idea of microwave power, while remaining completely apathetic about the deadly cancers coal-generating plants produce.
Breathing in coal particulates kills people. Carbon from coal may even be catastrophically altering the climactic balance of our entire planet. (Global warming, anyone?) But some would rather kill people and even ruin the entire planet than deal with scary, harmless microwaves. Think about all that next time someone on Slashdot writes another "cooked city" post.
Not really. Solar bases are built on both sides of the Moon, and satellites are used to relay microwave transmissions to areas not currently in line-of-sight. It's in the article.
You need to put in as much energy into the creation of the H2 as you will later get out. Creating H2 costs as much energy as you get back later.
That's exactly why we want to switch from fossil fuels to hydrogen. You're right that hydrogen isn't an energy source. It's an energy storage medium. And the fact that it's such an efficient storage medium is why we want to switch to it.
So all a hydrogen car will do will move the source of pollution from the car to the power plant.
Fuel cells are about twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. We have to generate the energy ourselves, of course, but as an energy storage medium hydrogen has huge advantages over fossil fuels and chemical batteries.
The beautiful thing about electrolyzing water to get hydrogen is that we can use any number of generation methods to do so. We'll start by ramping up the economy using fossil fuels, of course, but gradually move to wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal, and increased nuclear. Eventually, I'm sure, we'll end up getting most of our energy from some sort of space solar solution, but that may be a while.
In the meantime, the hydrogen economy will enable us to become vastly more flexible in how we acquire the energy to run our society, and to use energy more efficiently. Barring a series of quantum leaps in battery technology, it's really the only way to go.
I'm no expert, but certainly lunar solar power would eliminate one of the biggest factors potentially altering Earth's albedo: the gases and particulates released from fossil fuel combustion. I can't see any negative effect in some thousandths-of-a-percent change to the Moon's albedo that wouldn't be dwarfed by this benefit.
What sort of effect were you thinking of?
I've been thinking the same thing.
Also, a manned lunar base would be the first step toward implementing a lunar solar power system, one of the only viable candidates for replacing the energy we get from cheap oil today.
It didn't ruin "A Christmas Story".
First, BitPass uses a pre-paid card model, so there's only one charge on your credit card, the charge for buying the card itself. No individual transactions are listed. Your wife isn't going to know you're looking at micropayment pr0n, if that's what you're afraid of.
Second, the internet has no privacy in the first place. There are IP logs and traffic sniffers galore out there. If you want total privacy, stay off the internet and build yourself a cabin in Montana.
It didn't bash or hype micropayments, just described them as useful in certain situations for certain individuals or businesses. Which is the truth. (Although can I just say that I hate the word monetize? As in, "This allows us to monetize our content." I don't want to buy anything from anyone who monetizes. Please, just use "sell".)
Busted. I read what fit on my screen and posted.
Thanks for the slap.
The study just compared caffeinated coffee drinkers to non-coffee drinkers. Maybe those non-coffee drinkers were drinking 12-paks of Mountain Dew. Jumping to conclusions is bad science.
First off, congratulations to everyone at NASA and JPL! The landing went off like clockwork. You should be proud. I know I am.
But NASA TV... you blew it. Again.
Here you have this tremendous opportunity to involve Americans young and old with the space program, to get them excited and emotionally invested in space exploration, and what do you do? You show us video of the control room.... with the sound off. You let us in on what the Flight Director is saying, but you don't decode it for the average viewer so they know what it means. You make landing on another freaking planet more boring than most cable access shows. Take a bow.
You didn't even start your coverage until an hour before landing. If you had any vision, you could've made a whole day of it. You could've made it an event. Fuck Survivor, you've got the ultimate reality show! You should've had the whole nation tuned in. Instead they watched a repeat of MAD TV.
NASA TV, wake up! You should be kicking the Sci-Fi channel's ass. Really. I expect more from you in the future.
"The guy deserved to get scammed! Stupid people should suffer."
Ah, the spirit of Christmas on Slashdot.
I know one of the reasons they created BOINC is that the current SETI@home clientbase is very rigid and can only process data from one telescope -- Aricebo. I also know that the commandline client is tons faster than the screensaver-based client. Is BOINC's flexiblity going to end up making BOINC clients slower than the current dedicated clients?
If iTunes ends up dominating the online music market, I wouldn't be surprised to see one of their competitors sue them for predatory pricing, an anticompetitive practice which is illegal under U.S. antitrust laws. I doubt they'd win, but one never knows.
Who said anything about streaming? Streaming is wasteful and pointless for anything but live video. Even with a cut in download speed, your customers are still going to get the video way faster than USPS, and it's still going to be cheaper for you, too.
It is cheaper for me to deliver it by mail on a DVD than to offer it for download.
How do you figure?
Bandwidth is around $2 a gig, at least it is with my web host. Your movie is presumably less than a gig. You said it's a short movie, but let's be charitable and call it 500 megs. 500 megs should set you back about $1.
So why not charge $1.50 for the video online and make 50 cents each time someone downloads it? If it's good, charge a little more, like these guys are doing.
Just wondering how you decided that you couldn't make a profit by distributing online, considering some people already are.
They're not mutually exclusive, though. Any content seller can offer their content both via subscription and micropayments. Buying ala carte may be the step that eventually convinces a user to subscribe.
I think John Cleese could do a good job.
If I'd known responses to Clay Shirky's article would get their own thread, I would've waited. Here's a crosspost of my original response.
By way of setting up a straw man, Shirky asks: "Would you pay 25 cents to view a VR panorama of the Matterhorn?" As if one's personal preference for Matterhorn photography had anything to do with the success or failure of micropayments.
Make no mistake; like ALL business ventures, some people will fail with micropayments. Some will fail because they didn't know how to market their product, or because they set their prices too high or too low. But so what? That's endemic to capitalism, not just micropayments. Just because Crystal Pepsi failed doesn't mean capitalism itself is a failure. Engaging in these kind of arguments is a beginner's mistake, and most of Shirky's thoughts on micropayments surprisingly and unfortunately exhibit this same kind of sloppy thinking.
His "mental transaction costs" argument, for example, is predicated on users being forced to engage in one or two cent transactions every time they want to view a page. But most micro advocates have abandoned this line of thought. The idea of charging a penny-per-page is history. What they want in the 21st century is the ability to sell their products -- songs and webcomics, mostly -- at a fair price. And micropayments enable them to do that. Shirky endlessly flogs the dead horse penny-a-page model, but conveniently ignores the 99-cents-a-song model that's made iTunes Music Store such a success.
Scott McCloud himself writes that 1,354 readers bought Part One of "The Right Number" at 25 cents a pop. Considering that he was the very first BitPass seller ever, and that everyone who wanted to see his comic had to go through the effort of signing up for BitPass, that's remarkable, and worth talking about. It certainly flies in the face of Shirky's assertion that consumers on the internet are so lazy and indiscriminate in their tastes that they'll bolt to free content at the first opportunity. Scott's readers had to not only pay, but go through the effort of risking $3 signing up for a new, untested service. Scott's experience demonstrates that failure to get people to pay for your product has everything to do with your relationship to your audience and nothing to do with micropayments. But Shirky ignores it all the same.
Finally, Shirky's views on micropayments completely fail to address the idea that micropayments can work with other forms of payment, such as subscriptions or bundling, instead of replacing them. Buying content ala carte may be the step that convinces you to subscribe to a site, for example. Micropayments aren't an either/or, they're an and. One more choice, not one less. And of course, micropayments can work exceptionally well alongside free content. Any public television pledge drive shows this principle in action; even small tchotchkes can induce many people to donate. Any thoughtful analysis of the future of micropayments ought to examine this phenomenon, but Shirky doesn't.
In some ways, it's nice to see that Shirky hasn't changed his tune. At least he's willing to go down with the ship. But his analysis is -- by any standard -- unbelievably shallow. As the market for micropayment content increases, it will be interesting to see how he tries to spin reality.