There was a sidewalk in Queens, NYC, NY with ramp in it for a driveway (well not a ramp but no curb so you could drive up it). The driveway was for a garage. The garage door had been walled up. The former garage was only a few feet from the street so a car could not pull up into the driveway anymore. If you parked in front of this non-garage you would get a parking ticket for blocking the non-driveway. Even if the front of your car extended over the non-driveway you would get a ticket for obstructing the non-driveway.
When it is actually found and they decide to name it, the new name needs to start with P so all the mnemonics that used to work with Pluto as #9 will work with this new planet.
From Wikipedia: "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" "My Very Easy Method Just Shows Us Nine Planets" "My Very Efficient Memory Just Stores Up Nine Planets" "Mary's violet eyes make Johnny stay up nights, pondering"
Problems in Manhattan: 3x3 meter square is probably bigger than average apartment there. What about Z coordinate? 90 story condo probably has 90 other people (1 on each floor) in the same 3x3 meter square for X and Y coordinate.
This may be covered in the article. I did not read.
Even Uber lets women are who are not allowed to drive transportation, women not in the company of a husband, male relative or other man assumed to be such, are subject to prejudice and rude behavior from males. In other words, if you are a woman walking around with out a male protector you are considered to be a prostitute or someone who does not mind men thinking you are a prostitute.
I don't think Uber is a cure-all for the oppression women suffer in Saudi Arabia.
This is probably all fake and they are using the crash site to dispose of the missing Malaysian flight 370 that has been hidden by the Chinese up until now
If a corporation can be a person, why can't a chimp?
Step 1: Create a corporation called Chimp Inc. and make its owner a chimp named Bonzo. (People can leave their fortunes to a pet cat, they should be able to leave controlling interest of a corporation to a chimp.)
Step 2: Once Bonzo the chimp has control of the Chimp Inc. corporation, have Chimp Inc. buy Bonzo the chimp.
Step 3: Bonzo is the sole owner of Chimp Inc.
and the only property of Chimp Inc. is Bonzo.
Chimp Inc. is a legal corporate person. Chimp Inc. = Bonzo the chimp. Therefore Bonzo the chimp is a legal person.
If it works China will use the partnership to steal any useful technology, produce it themselves and out compete Lockheed. See partnerships with high speed train manufacturers and solar cell production.
There was an article earlier in the Times, before this one, that detailed how homes with existing Solar Panels did not have electricity after the storm because they were designed to feed directly into the grid,not store locally in batteries. This is a cheaper design. The houses usually still ran off the grid. The grid had to be powered down in places to prevent downed power lines from killing people and the Solar Panels had to stop feeding electricity into the grid to allow workers to repair lines. In order for people to go off the grid they would need to put in banks of batteries. People tend to put them in basements which would have been a bad idea in this case because in a lot of places the basements flooded. This proposal advocates changing the current default Solar installation to allow people to go off the grid when the grid goes down.
Even though shows like Star Trek show Dyson spheres to be a solid objects, Dyson originally meant it to be more like a sphericle cloud of technology that surrounds a star. The cloud could be made up of hollowed out asteroids or spacestations or nano-bots. All of these would intercept the energy from the local sun.If some leaked through between two space stations someone else would build a space station further out and intercept the overflow. There might be a high probability of collision, but the cloud will not fall into the sun in one piece.
He mentions that an aquaculture farm is letting him use their greenhouses. The name contains "Dulce" which made me think of "Dulse" a seaweed that people in Ireland eat. It is not only the Japanese and Koreans (and aparently the Hawaiins) who eat seaweed. I would guess Dulse is a cold water seaweed and unsuitable for a greenhouse in Austin Texas
I think they got the measurements and units wrong. The article says that the power would not be generated like a windmill but from a wire. Then it says that the wire would be relatively short and the sail impossibly huge. Chances are the article got it wrong and the reality is that a small sail would be used to tow out a long 5,000 mile spool of wire. As the solarwind particles cross over the wire it will create the electricity just like passing a wire through a magnetic field creates electricity. I would like to read the original source rather than this typical example of science journalism.
Capitalist economics doesn't work like that. Money that consumers don't spend doesn't contribute to GDP, but money they do spend does, and GDP is the magic number (remember, we're all happier when the numbers go up).
This highlights why OSS won't be a pillar of Obama's spending spree. Microsoft sell software made by developers they pay and these developers then spend their pay on other software (say). This moves money round the economy continuously and makes the GDP look great. Paying a developer to create a free piece of software is effectively a one off payment and doesn't contribute to GDP much (it mainly increases coffee consumption), in fact all it does really is inflate government spending/borrowing.
What about highway spending? If the government pays people to build highways does this money disappear? Do all the roads paid for by government need to be toll roads so we can employ toll collectors othewise no jobs are created and no GDP growth takes place?
No, companies are contracted, workers are hired, people are paid, infrastructure gets built enabling other companies to more easily and efficiently provide goods and services.
Likewise, this proposal says: pay people to produce free software. People are paid, a pool of talent and experience is built up. Businesses get software that will enable them to provide goods and services more cheaply and efficintly. At the end of the program we will have experienced programmers who may go on to create their own businesses, rather than unemployed road contstruction workers. There will also be an aftermarket for services of installing and maintaining this software.
This is an infrastructure program.
The downsides are to companies like Microsoft that sell boxed software but no services. They would be the only ones hurt by this program. All others would benefit.
SF: Dune by Frank Herbert Asimov's Early Robot Series - Caves of Steel,The Naked Sun,Robots of Dawn Heinlein's "Juvenile" books - http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/1872/juvie.htm I especially liked "The Star Beast" and "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" Daniel Keys Moran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Keys_Moran Especially "The Long Run", "The Armageddon Blues" Vernor Vinge: "The Peace War" The hero is a child math wiz. Douglass Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book #1
Fantasy: JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings R.A. MacAvoy, Damiano Series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._MacAvoy Gene Wolf Urth of the New Sun Series, maybe just the first book. Terry Pratchett's Disc World books
I love almost all of Larry Niven's books but World Out of Time may not be good for pre-teen boys. Part of the plot is that most of humanity is wiped out. The remainder is look like pre-teen boys but are actually immortal. So far so good. These boys do maintain a breeding population that consists mostly of women with the minimal number of men to keep them pregnant. There is at least 1 orgy scene and some other sex scenes. Minimal violence though. So if you don't mind your 10 year olds reading about orgies, go for it.
I believe screen price is a function of screen size but 1/2 size screen is less than 1/2 the price.
Two small screens with a total area of 8 sq units costs less than one larger screen of 8 sq units.
Using a virtual keyboard you still get to input data so maybe the "book" is the form factor not the function. In other words, it is still a laptop that can run programs and edit code, its just shaped like a book. I hope this is true or they should change the name from OLPC (one laptop per child) to something else.
The XO Laptop display is visible in full daylight. Its software is completely open. It can read and display open formats like plain text and PDF. It can download the files from the Internet using WiFi. It has extremely low power consumption and if you find yourself too far away from an outlet, you can charge it yourself. For the cost of a Kindle from Amazon you can buy an XO and donate one to a child.
From the specs page of the XO PC at One Laptop Per Child:
* Liquid-crystal display: 7.5" Dual-mode TFT display;
* Viewing area: 152.4mm × 114.3mm;
* Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 DPI);
* Monochrome display: High-resolution, reflective sunlight-readable monochrome mode; Color display: Standard-resolution, Quincunx-sampled, transmissive color mode;
* LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with backlight on;
* The display-controller chip (DCON) with memory that enables the display to remain live with the processor suspended; the display and this chip are the basis of our extremely low power architecture; the display controller chip also enables deswizzling and anti-aliasing in color mode.
However from 2000-present, MS has been rapidly shooting itself in the foot with missed opportunities, disasters such as Vista, and falling to DRM. Steve Ballmer seems to be much more for DRM then Gates ever was, all Gates wanted to do was make some cash and make the computer easy to use, the same vision as Apple.
I think it was the book Innovator's Dilemma or it might have been some other management or business book, that said that a company listens to its customers, becomes successful and grows. Then there comes a point when the company keeps listening to its customers but the customers are giving it bad advice, along the lines of, "more of the same, but bigger or faster and throw in this". The product outgrows certain niches or is customized too much for a subset of large customers. At this point smaller companies with a different way of ding things can squeeze into the cracks answering the needs of the customers left behind. Using this as a base, the new companies grow and kill off the old company.
This applies to Microsoft if you understand who their customers are: other businesses, not consumers. All their decisions make sense if you understand that fact. Each new OS requires (not takes advantage of, but requires) larger hard drives, more memory and faster processors. Like Vista , all the previous OS versions required an upgrade to use, by design. This keeps Dell, Gateway etc happy as people throw out their old PC and buy a brand new one. If the consumer was Microsoft's customer they would be finding ways to write more efficient code that runs faster on existing hardware. As hardware advances, that code would become even faster instead of the situation we have now, where each new version of an application on faster and faster hardware delivers roughly the same word processing performance.
DRM is the same. The customer is not the consumer who would like to watch movies or listen to music with his computer. The customer is Hollywood and the RIAA. Microsoft listens to them. They say: "Find us a way to charge the consumer every time he listens to a song and we will give you a cut of the income." The consumer says: "Find me a way to make it easy to organize and listen to the large collection of CD's and albums I have collected and paid for over the years". Microsoft says, "Where's my cut?" to the consumer and then listens to the RIAA instead.
The third major customer is businesses or governments. In this case Microsoft is not trying to keep the business or government as a whole happy, they are cutting deals with the decision makers to preserve their monopoly. The citizens of a country will be better off if their government uses open file standards but this will threaten Microsoft Office's monopoly. Government employees get kickbacks, sweetheart deals and job offers from Microsoft in order to get them to choose Microsoft's products over what is in the ultimate customer, the citizen's, best interest.
The same thing happens in businesses where Microsoft cuts deals with other companies in return for stock, investment or the promise of future acquisition. It would really be in the companies interest to use a free OS like Linux or an alternative file format for music or movies but Microsoft cuts deals with individuals in management that screw over the business in the long term. The managers who sign the deals don't give a crap. They are getting their pay off down the road. See all the companies that signed up for Fair Play, or whoever was behind SCO or the hundreds of other instances that show up daily on Slashdot.
Remember that fact: You are not Microsoft's customer.They do not care about you.. Remember that and all their decisions make sense. Their customers are the memory, disk drive and PC manufacturers, the content providers and any other business they can cut a deal with and sell you down the river for. This is not a Ballmer thing. This has been going on s
I vaguely remember reading a science fiction short story, it might have been Simak or Cornbluth I don't remember, but the gist of it was that evil aliens attempt to destroy Earth's economy and cause general chaos by giving someone matter duplicators like the food replicators in Star Trek. Because there is an infinite supply of everything, there can be no more factories, jobs, capitalism, stock markets etc. and society almost collapses. This is analogous to music, books, video on the Internet. Supply is infinite, so cost is zero.
What saves the Earth is that unique items become valuable so assembly lines pop up to alter and customize the mass produced replicated items. If I remember correctly, the example in the story is of TV dinners. Value is added by adding salt and pepper to taste. The worker is compensated for the effort of seasoning.
How can customization and personalization be applied to music, books, video? Well, as has already been noted, live performance is one way. You can download a copy of a song without paying or you can pay to see the performance live. The experience of seeing the performer in person cannot be copied and you get bragging rights with your friends: "Oh yes, the new song by The Screaming Banana's is really good but you should see them LIVE, I have."
Another way might take this personal connection with the artist and uniqueness item a step further. The artist could supply a custom, digitally signed message to individuals for the right price. If a singer has a number one single and is famous world wide, that singer could offer a mp3 of the single and in addition a custom message "This version of the song goes out to Steve, my #1 fan". This is like charging more for an autographed copy.
Or, as an analogy to signed prints of artworks: numbered copies of a song could be released. Of course, the numbers could be forged. To combat that, there could be a central registry, a public website listing the 10, 100 or 500 fans who bid to have their own copy of the song: "I have copy #365 of the new U2 single. I paid $100 for it, if you don't believe me, look at their website."
Finally, there are examples from the art world: the guy who wraps buildings and built the orange sheet thing in Central Park in New York, Cristof. He makes money off of free projects that are open to the public by auctioning off the signed plans, signed conceptual drawing and other items associated with producing the artwork.
So the idea is to have a two level market. One free of charge, the more copies the better, as advertisements for the second, specialty market of rare, customized items related to the free one. The second market costs. More work for the artist but they will at least get paid not some middleman in at a record label.
As any Marketing person can tell you, demand is psychological and can be created. One of the best ways to create a demand is to make an item cool and unique, to make sure there are have's and have nots. People will pay good money for stupid, worthless things as status symbols, to show they are better than everyone else.
Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results.
I'd say we are best at greed. I remember in 1998-1999 myself and other people saying that it was a bubble and there would be a major correction or crash and I am no financial genius. What happened was that people who were financial geniuses knew it was a bubble but figured they could get out at the last minute and still make a killing. Meanwhile, they kept telling everyone else it wasn't a bubble in order to get everyone else to put their money in the market and sustain the bubble a little longer. They managed to keep things going for years after it was obvious that it was unsustainable. A lot of those financial geniuses came out smelling like roses while us schlubs lost money.
What is worse than the people losing money is that the market is in a sort of exhausted state with no direction. People have no where to put their money except into real estate, driving those prices up into another bubble. A real estate bubble was the last phase of Japan's economy after it's boom in the 1970's and 1980's before it went into the never ending slide/doldrums that it is in today. There needs to be investment into something that creates new ideas, new wealth and new real growth not new McMansions and impotence cures for aging baby boomers.
Fields where investment would be nice but probably won't happen: Alternate fuels, Safe nuclear fission power plants or practical fusion.
Something else that won't happen: Reorganize our entire suburban sprawl into small tightly integrated cities with housing next to workplace and markets. This would limit the need for cars to go everywhere. If people walked more we would have less need for a hydrogen car, or electric car or any kind of car. It would probably also help with the obesity epidemic, asthma epidemic caused by air pollution and all the health problems that go with it.
Really pie in the sky would be: Cheap space flight, space elevator, asteroid mining and orbital solar power plants.
These would not be bubbles because something that would be productive and self sustaining would come from the investment, not a burst of activity and spending that leads nowhere.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the invention that Rusty makes that is powered by the heart and soul of an orphan boy. It is a little creepy.
There was a sidewalk in Queens, NYC, NY with ramp in it for a driveway (well not a ramp but no curb so you could drive up it). The driveway was for a garage. The garage door had been walled up. The former garage was only a few feet from the street so a car could not pull up into the driveway anymore. If you parked in front of this non-garage you would get a parking ticket for blocking the non-driveway. Even if the front of your car extended over the non-driveway you would get a ticket for obstructing the non-driveway.
When it is actually found and they decide to name it, the new name needs to start with P so all the mnemonics that used to work with Pluto as #9 will work with this new planet.
From Wikipedia:
"My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas"
"My Very Easy Method Just Shows Us Nine Planets"
"My Very Efficient Memory Just Stores Up Nine Planets"
"Mary's violet eyes make Johnny stay up nights, pondering"
Persephone might work.
Problems in Manhattan:
3x3 meter square is probably bigger than average apartment there.
What about Z coordinate? 90 story condo probably has 90 other people (1 on each floor) in the same 3x3 meter square for X and Y coordinate.
This may be covered in the article. I did not read.
Homo Florensis is the Hobbit.
Now bones of oddly shaped humanoid creatures found piled in the bottom of a cave?
A. Balin and his Dwarves in Moria.
B. Gollum's leftover Orc bones in his original cave before Bilbo met him.
Even Uber lets women are who are not allowed to drive transportation, women not in the company of a husband, male relative or other man assumed to be such, are subject to prejudice and rude behavior from males. In other words, if you are a woman walking around with out a male protector you are considered to be a prostitute or someone who does not mind men thinking you are a prostitute.
I don't think Uber is a cure-all for the oppression women suffer in Saudi Arabia.
That explains why in Star Trek all intelligent life can interbreed despite evolving separately for billions of years. ;)
This is probably all fake and they are using the crash site to dispose of the missing Malaysian flight 370 that has been hidden by the Chinese up until now
Can we use "Ceti Alpha Six" on a planet orbiting a star not in the constellation "Ceti"
If a corporation can be a person, why can't a chimp?
Step 1: Create a corporation called Chimp Inc. and make its owner a chimp named Bonzo. (People can leave their fortunes to a pet cat, they should be able to leave controlling interest of a corporation to a chimp.)
Step 2: Once Bonzo the chimp has control of the Chimp Inc. corporation, have Chimp Inc. buy Bonzo the chimp.
Step 3: Bonzo is the sole owner of Chimp Inc.
and the only property of Chimp Inc. is Bonzo.
Chimp Inc. is a legal corporate person.
Chimp Inc. = Bonzo the chimp.
Therefore Bonzo the chimp is a legal person.
If it works China will use the partnership to steal any useful technology, produce it themselves and out compete Lockheed. See partnerships with high speed train manufacturers and solar cell production.
Time to kill a whole lot of pandas and collect their blood to extract the antibiotics.
There was an article earlier in the Times, before this one, that detailed how homes with existing Solar Panels did not have electricity after the storm because they were designed to feed directly into the grid,not store locally in batteries. This is a cheaper design. The houses usually still ran off the grid. The grid had to be powered down in places to prevent downed power lines from killing people and the Solar Panels had to stop feeding electricity into the grid to allow workers to repair lines. In order for people to go off the grid they would need to put in banks of batteries. People tend to put them in basements which would have been a bad idea in this case because in a lot of places the basements flooded. This proposal advocates changing the current default Solar installation to allow people to go off the grid when the grid goes down.
Even though shows like Star Trek show Dyson spheres to be a solid objects, Dyson originally meant it to be more like a sphericle cloud of technology that surrounds a star. The cloud could be made up of hollowed out asteroids or spacestations or nano-bots. All of these would intercept the energy from the local sun.If some leaked through between two space stations someone else would build a space station further out and intercept the overflow. There might be a high probability of collision, but the cloud will not fall into the sun in one piece.
He mentions that an aquaculture farm is letting him use their greenhouses. The name contains "Dulce" which made me think of "Dulse" a seaweed that people in Ireland eat. It is not only the Japanese and Koreans (and aparently the Hawaiins) who eat seaweed. I would guess Dulse is a cold water seaweed and unsuitable for a greenhouse in Austin Texas
350 pounds? With a weight budget like that, they could have sent me to the edge of space. That would have been an amateur record.;)
I think they got the measurements and units wrong. The article says that the power would not be generated like a windmill but from a wire. Then it says that the wire would be relatively short and the sail impossibly huge. Chances are the article got it wrong and the reality is that a small sail would be used to tow out a long 5,000 mile spool of wire. As the solarwind particles cross over the wire it will create the electricity just like passing a wire through a magnetic field creates electricity. I would like to read the original source rather than this typical example of science journalism.
What about highway spending? If the government pays people to build highways does this money disappear? Do all the roads paid for by government need to be toll roads so we can employ toll collectors othewise no jobs are created and no GDP growth takes place?
No, companies are contracted, workers are hired, people are paid, infrastructure gets built enabling other companies to more easily and efficiently provide goods and services.
Likewise, this proposal says: pay people to produce free software. People are paid, a pool of talent and experience is built up. Businesses get software that will enable them to provide goods and services more cheaply and efficintly. At the end of the program we will have experienced programmers who may go on to create their own businesses, rather than unemployed road contstruction workers. There will also be an aftermarket for services of installing and maintaining this software.
This is an infrastructure program.
The downsides are to companies like Microsoft that sell boxed software but no services. They would be the only ones hurt by this program. All others would benefit.
SF:
Dune by Frank Herbert
Asimov's Early Robot Series - Caves of Steel,The Naked Sun,Robots of Dawn
Heinlein's "Juvenile" books - http://www.geocities.com/NapaValley/1872/juvie.htm I especially liked "The Star Beast" and "Have Space Suit, Will Travel"
Daniel Keys Moran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Keys_Moran Especially "The Long Run", "The Armageddon Blues"
Vernor Vinge: "The Peace War" The hero is a child math wiz.
Douglass Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book #1
Fantasy:
JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
R.A. MacAvoy, Damiano Series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._MacAvoy
Gene Wolf Urth of the New Sun Series, maybe just the first book.
Terry Pratchett's Disc World books
I love almost all of Larry Niven's books but World Out of Time may not be good for pre-teen boys. Part of the plot is that most of humanity is wiped out. The remainder is look like pre-teen boys but are actually immortal. So far so good. These boys do maintain a breeding population that consists mostly of women with the minimal number of men to keep them pregnant. There is at least 1 orgy scene and some other sex scenes. Minimal violence though. So if you don't mind your 10 year olds reading about orgies, go for it.
I believe screen price is a function of screen size but 1/2 size screen is less than 1/2 the price.
Two small screens with a total area of 8 sq units costs less than one larger screen of 8 sq units.
Using a virtual keyboard you still get to input data so maybe the "book" is the form factor not the function. In other words, it is still a laptop that can run programs and edit code, its just shaped like a book. I hope this is true or they should change the name from OLPC (one laptop per child) to something else.
The XO Laptop display is visible in full daylight. Its software is completely open. It can read and display open formats like plain text and PDF. It can download the files from the Internet using WiFi. It has extremely low power consumption and if you find yourself too far away from an outlet, you can charge it yourself. For the cost of a Kindle from Amazon you can buy an XO and donate one to a child.
From the specs page of the XO PC at One Laptop Per Child:
http://laptop.org/laptop/hardware/specs.shtml
* Liquid-crystal display: 7.5" Dual-mode TFT display;
* Viewing area: 152.4mm × 114.3mm;
* Resolution: 1200 (H) × 900 (V) resolution (200 DPI);
* Monochrome display: High-resolution, reflective sunlight-readable monochrome mode; Color display: Standard-resolution, Quincunx-sampled, transmissive color mode;
* LCD power consumption: 0.1 Watt with backlight off; 0.2-1.0 Watt with backlight on;
* The display-controller chip (DCON) with memory that enables the display to remain live with the processor suspended; the display and this chip are the basis of our extremely low power architecture; the display controller chip also enables deswizzling and anti-aliasing in color mode.
I think it was the book Innovator's Dilemma or it might have been some other management or business book, that said that a company listens to its customers, becomes successful and grows. Then there comes a point when the company keeps listening to its customers but the customers are giving it bad advice, along the lines of, "more of the same, but bigger or faster and throw in this". The product outgrows certain niches or is customized too much for a subset of large customers. At this point smaller companies with a different way of ding things can squeeze into the cracks answering the needs of the customers left behind. Using this as a base, the new companies grow and kill off the old company.
This applies to Microsoft if you understand who their customers are: other businesses, not consumers. All their decisions make sense if you understand that fact. Each new OS requires (not takes advantage of, but requires) larger hard drives, more memory and faster processors. Like Vista , all the previous OS versions required an upgrade to use, by design. This keeps Dell, Gateway etc happy as people throw out their old PC and buy a brand new one. If the consumer was Microsoft's customer they would be finding ways to write more efficient code that runs faster on existing hardware. As hardware advances, that code would become even faster instead of the situation we have now, where each new version of an application on faster and faster hardware delivers roughly the same word processing performance.
DRM is the same. The customer is not the consumer who would like to watch movies or listen to music with his computer. The customer is Hollywood and the RIAA. Microsoft listens to them. They say: "Find us a way to charge the consumer every time he listens to a song and we will give you a cut of the income." The consumer says: "Find me a way to make it easy to organize and listen to the large collection of CD's and albums I have collected and paid for over the years". Microsoft says, "Where's my cut?" to the consumer and then listens to the RIAA instead.
The third major customer is businesses or governments. In this case Microsoft is not trying to keep the business or government as a whole happy, they are cutting deals with the decision makers to preserve their monopoly. The citizens of a country will be better off if their government uses open file standards but this will threaten Microsoft Office's monopoly. Government employees get kickbacks, sweetheart deals and job offers from Microsoft in order to get them to choose Microsoft's products over what is in the ultimate customer, the citizen's, best interest.
The same thing happens in businesses where Microsoft cuts deals with other companies in return for stock, investment or the promise of future acquisition. It would really be in the companies interest to use a free OS like Linux or an alternative file format for music or movies but Microsoft cuts deals with individuals in management that screw over the business in the long term. The managers who sign the deals don't give a crap. They are getting their pay off down the road. See all the companies that signed up for Fair Play, or whoever was behind SCO or the hundreds of other instances that show up daily on Slashdot.
Remember that fact: You are not Microsoft's customer.They do not care about you.. Remember that and all their decisions make sense. Their customers are the memory, disk drive and PC manufacturers, the content providers and any other business they can cut a deal with and sell you down the river for. This is not a Ballmer thing. This has been going on s
I vaguely remember reading a science fiction short story, it might have been Simak or Cornbluth I don't remember, but the gist of it was that evil aliens attempt to destroy Earth's economy and cause general chaos by giving someone matter duplicators like the food replicators in Star Trek. Because there is an infinite supply of everything, there can be no more factories, jobs, capitalism, stock markets etc. and society almost collapses. This is analogous to music, books, video on the Internet. Supply is infinite, so cost is zero.
What saves the Earth is that unique items become valuable so assembly lines pop up to alter and customize the mass produced replicated items. If I remember correctly, the example in the story is of TV dinners. Value is added by adding salt and pepper to taste. The worker is compensated for the effort of seasoning.
How can customization and personalization be applied to music, books, video? Well, as has already been noted, live performance is one way. You can download a copy of a song without paying or you can pay to see the performance live. The experience of seeing the performer in person cannot be copied and you get bragging rights with your friends: "Oh yes, the new song by The Screaming Banana's is really good but you should see them LIVE, I have."
Another way might take this personal connection with the artist and uniqueness item a step further. The artist could supply a custom, digitally signed message to individuals for the right price. If a singer has a number one single and is famous world wide, that singer could offer a mp3 of the single and in addition a custom message "This version of the song goes out to Steve, my #1 fan". This is like charging more for an autographed copy.
Or, as an analogy to signed prints of artworks: numbered copies of a song could be released. Of course, the numbers could be forged. To combat that, there could be a central registry, a public website listing the 10, 100 or 500 fans who bid to have their own copy of the song: "I have copy #365 of the new U2 single. I paid $100 for it, if you don't believe me, look at their website."
Finally, there are examples from the art world: the guy who wraps buildings and built the orange sheet thing in Central Park in New York, Cristof. He makes money off of free projects that are open to the public by auctioning off the signed plans, signed conceptual drawing and other items associated with producing the artwork.
So the idea is to have a two level market. One free of charge, the more copies the better, as advertisements for the second, specialty market of rare, customized items related to the free one. The second market costs. More work for the artist but they will at least get paid not some middleman in at a record label.
As any Marketing person can tell you, demand is psychological and can be created. One of the best ways to create a demand is to make an item cool and unique, to make sure there are have's and have nots. People will pay good money for stupid, worthless things as status symbols, to show they are better than everyone else.
Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results.
I'd say we are best at greed. I remember in 1998-1999 myself and other people saying that it was a bubble and there would be a major correction or crash and I am no financial genius. What happened was that people who were financial geniuses knew it was a bubble but figured they could get out at the last minute and still make a killing. Meanwhile, they kept telling everyone else it wasn't a bubble in order to get everyone else to put their money in the market and sustain the bubble a little longer. They managed to keep things going for years after it was obvious that it was unsustainable. A lot of those financial geniuses came out smelling like roses while us schlubs lost money.
What is worse than the people losing money is that the market is in a sort of exhausted state with no direction. People have no where to put their money except into real estate, driving those prices up into another bubble. A real estate bubble was the last phase of Japan's economy after it's boom in the 1970's and 1980's before it went into the never ending slide/doldrums that it is in today. There needs to be investment into something that creates new ideas, new wealth and new real growth not new McMansions and impotence cures for aging baby boomers.
Fields where investment would be nice but probably won't happen:
Alternate fuels, Safe nuclear fission power plants or practical fusion.
Something else that won't happen:
Reorganize our entire suburban sprawl into small tightly integrated cities with housing next to workplace and markets. This would limit the need for cars to go everywhere. If people walked more we would have less need for a hydrogen car, or electric car or any kind of car. It would probably also help with the obesity epidemic, asthma epidemic caused by air pollution and all the health problems that go with it.
Really pie in the sky would be:
Cheap space flight, space elevator, asteroid mining and orbital solar power plants.
These would not be bubbles because something that would be productive and self sustaining would come from the investment, not a burst of activity and spending that leads nowhere.