If you select then choose View Selection Source from the context menu, Firefox does not seem to re-request the page. It shows th actual HTML behind the selection, including dynamically modified and generated code. I'm no expert but it's definitely different behavior.
So Ctrl-A to select all, right-click, then View Selection Source.
I hope this helps. Thanks in advance for your insulting retort.
a defensive offensive that will be spammed to heck
on
The Knol Hypothesis
·
· Score: 1
Wikipedia is much worse for Google than a popular site in search results that doesn't use AdSense. Increasingly users will bypass Google search to go directly to Wikipedia. In both Firefox and Opera Mini 4 on my phone, I set up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s quick searches; so I can jump directly to the Wikipedia article on any unfamiliar topic or acronym like 'w Tub girl'. I find I use it as much as Google search. The refrain "justfuckinggoogleit.com" is being replaced with "read the damn Wikipedia article first", and that is hugely threatening to Google.
What will kill Knol is spammers. If one person can copy a Wikipedia article into a knol, a thousand spammers will, each inserting a single link to another pointless web page in their endless halls of mirrors. Already, Googling for a relatively popular phrase like 'Katana driver download' brings up matches from garbled splogs[**] on blogspot.com.
[**] Don't google for 'splog', use your quick search bookmarklet
Me, I think we could've made it to Mars by now if we really set our minds to it
Thanks for making my point. We have made it to Mars. Spirit and Opportunity are up there right now, doing our bidding. If you don't find that more inspirational than pipeline robots, you need to turn in your geek card;-) I'm not disparaging the romance of humans on Mars, but robots throughout the solar system for 5% the cost is cheaper faster better.
(Indeed I anthropomorphize the hell out of the little guys. I love it, JPL loves it, and I maintain most people under 40 would do so too if NASA changed its focus.)
I've got 3.5 GB in "My Music", 95% of it.aac files of CDs I own ripped via iTunes. I've copied it to my Buffalo Linkstation NAS, but I can't access it all while away from home or with friends (I listen to a subset off my cellphone's 2GB SD card). The obvious solution is to give the NAS a static IP and put an HTTP server on it.
I believe that's a substantial non-infringing use of a shared folder. And it allows distribution to anyone who discovers (or to whom I disclose) its URL. But why should I care if others break the law accessing my files? The only downside to me is if strangers over-consume my resources and ISP bandwidth.
1. Has the MafIAA ever gone after someone for having a shared folder? I'm not talking about P2P networks, just a network-accessible folder containing copyrighted material.
2. Surely there are lots of Slashdot geeks who have such a set up already, how's it working out for you? Can you sleep at night? Did you put a password on the folder? Can you give me its URL?;-)
Neither you or I is going to vacation on another planet. So what's more inspiring?:
a) Looking up at the moon and knowing "Humans played golf and drove cars up there" b) Looking up at Mars and knowing "Our 'little avatars that could' are driving around up there"
? a) is somewhat more fun, but not worth 100x the cost.
G1G1 donors (like me) also got 1 year of free T-Mobile Hotspot access, which is about $360 value, so the value received for your $400 is more than the $400, so no charitable deduction.
The entire OLPC model is causing problems at this point, EeePC just completely stole the market from them with a better device, quicker.
Your comment makes no sense at all. OLPC is an education project. How many large deals with education ministries has EeePC landed? Different computers for different markets.
It is obvious that the "One Laptop Per Child in developing countries" market is slow and tough going, but OLPC adding a consumer focus would be an enormous distraction. And the moderate success of Give One Get One shows that there ISN'T a huge USA consumer market for the XO.
The XO machine works, the hardware and software developers continue to do an excellent job, some education roll-outs are happening, the free content and activities created for the project are just getting started and will be GREAT for education. Give the project time!
The initial Mars Rover mission cost less than a billion dollars, compared with $130 billion to put astronauts in the International Space Station near earth to little purpose, and a similar 12-digit price tag for the shuttle.
So why do politicians and NASA spend 100x to put a human in the tin can? Besides the self-perpetuating vast sums of money involved, I think they're old and out-of-touch. They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room.
Is there a politician saying "Elect me and I pledge to abandon manned exploration to focus instead on landing autonomous craft on every planet in the solar system. Let commercial ventures and other countries fight for 300th person in Earth orbit and second place on the moon. We'll go new places cheaper faster and better."
So true. As part of my solar PV installation, I got a net use meter. Instead of that pathetic stupid antique spinning disk that requires a stopwatch and a calculator, I've got an LCD showing instantaneous consumption in kiloWatts. So every time I walk in or out I check my consumption. Any time it's above 1 kW I try to figure out why. I soon realized the downstairs track lights eat 400 Watts, so I leave them off. It pointed out that when a vacuum cleaner brags about stupendous suction power, that means high electric consumption, so I don't leave it running while moving the furniture and changing attachments. It reminds me to activate standby and switch off my computer power strip. It shows that my Sub-Zero fridge is a beautiful piece of inefficient constantly-running crap. Etc. etc. If every house had one, consumption would take a quick dive.
It's still flawed:
The display panel should be inside the house and/or have a Web server so I don't have to stand outside with a flashlight while someone else flips switches.
It's hard to tell which circuit is consuming power. I've got Kill-A-Watt to monitor a single outlet and the electric meter for the whole house, I want a meter built into the electric panel so I can meter the middle—individual circuits.
Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on.
Solar panels are almost maintenance-free. Wiping the dust off occasionally boosts efficiency slightly. And if they track the sun, the mechanism might break down. From my experience with my solar PV panels, that's IT.
And you don't need land, you need flat roofs. Start with big warehouses in the Southwest.
So I have Flac installed in C:\Program Files\FLAC and I dutifully installed the new version, which DIDN'T seem to install a new libFLAC anywhere, just a new flac.exe
But I also have copies of libFLAC.dll in C:\Program Files\guliverkli\oggcodecs, and C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins. The web sites for Media Player Classic ("guliverkli") and VideoLAN indicate I have the latest Windows version and neither mentions this vulnerability.
This is probably cruft that I accumulated trying to play various media files from the IntarWubwubwub. "Just click to _download this plugin_ and play this format!" Great, now it's a year later and I don't know where they all came from. I think one came from http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ , but that was last updated 2006-02-24 (and again, no mention of this vulnerability).
F*** it, I'll just delete every file matching libflac*.dll and see what happens. But the various Windows free media players could sure do a better job with all the money I give them;-)
Linux package management seems *better* than random untracked installs and downloads in Windows.
Offer it on Craigslist for free or stupid cheap, immediately.
Don't put it in the garage, don't think "Maybe I'll put Linux on that" or "It'll be good to have for parts and backup" Just DITCH it.
The half-life of electronics is so short that just putting it aside for a month makes it worthless. Try giving away the 16MB flash memory that came with your phone or camera, you can't. Your old printer won't be supported soon. The software you didn't need becomes software no one wants.
The act of writing "You can come by this weekend to pick it up" forces you to back up the data, find the box, and get it ready. If you put it off, you're trashing your old tech.
When someone e-mails you an evil Office attachment, upload it to Google Docs, http://docs.google.com and remail everyone a link to your version. Some smarter recipients will realize they can browse and collaborate on your version and still save it locally (in Office and ODF formats). Eventually Office gets marginalized, along with the moronic drudges that use its tool set inappropriately.
As a wise man once said:
"I'm trying to ban e-mail attachments. I just want an ASCII e-mail.
If you want to show me something, put it in a Web page, publish it,
give me the URL, and I'll look at it. That's the new model."
Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in May 1997 Upside magazine.
Sorry, you're wrong. Excessive tracking weight does not compress the music in the sense of this article. It leads to tracking distortion and an altered frequency response.
Microsoft knows that if they break backward computability people will scream. And they do scream.
Microsoft used to care about backwards compatibility, now... not so much. Office 2000 doesn't work well on Vista (mail merge broken), Outlook 2000 has problems (MS changed the Windows Address Book protocol. Many older USB drivers don't work on Vista. MS is not stupid, they figure out how much pain an upgrade can inflict vs. how much they'll get from forced software updates vs. the effort required vs. how many users will reject the update. Other software vendors like Adobe go along; why should they care about my problems running Fireworks 4 on Vista?
What blows my mind is how many people unthinkingly accept the idea that any software more than 5 years old is unlikely to still work. Backwards compatibility is hard but far from impossible, back in the Windows 3.0 and 95 days MS made extreme efforts because they wanted to move people to Windows.
I can only assume we have some impact. Is it 100% our fault? I find that difficult to believe given that we have not been collecting data for very long and we occupy such an insignificant amount of the surface of this planet it is ridiculous.
From those observed phenomena and scientific principles, it's all up to climate scientists to model the effects on the atmosphere, NOT base it on what people feel.
Don't pretend that your armchair analysis is balanced or reasonable. "to me it's clear there's NOT scientific consensus on the _cause_ of global warming or what's going to happen 50 years from now" The IPCC report is the consensus:
"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."
Footnotes on page 4 of the summary indicate very likely and likely mean "the assessed likelihood, using expert judgment", are over 90% and 66% respectively.
I'm not sure if the drive takes advantage of NV cache without specific O.S. support. Even without O.S. support, the drive could decide "You keep reading blocks X Y and Z, so I'll store them in NV cache" (drives already do this with their conventional RAM cache, typically 8MB) and "I'll keep your pending data writes in NV cache while waiting for the disk to spin up".
Windows Vista's ReadyDrive takes specific advantage of this feature: "During shutdown or hibernate all the disk sectors needed to boot or resume are pinned into the NV cache... Offsets within files and/or specific LBAs can be specified by the PC OEM in registry for pinning in the NV Cache". I converted the MS PowerPoint presentation http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dcvvrqtp_13gj635t&fs=true (yay Google Docs, die PowerPoint DIE!).
Two college kids set up Fairtunes (Salon article) during the Napster heyday so music downloaders could contribute money directly to musicians. They received a pittance in donations despite a lot of publicity.
Fairtunes was divorced from the act of grabbing an MP3 from Napster, so perhaps the people who claimed they weren't pirates and intended to donate money conveniently never got around to paying. Maybe by making the donation part of the download process, Radiohead will get more people to pay a decent price... but I wouldn't bet on people's ethics on the Internet.
As many people already corrected, you can save a Zip file to your drive that contains the entire presentation that you can run in your browser. Sheesh.
You're confusing the 386i with the 386 co-processor board that Sun made available for its 680x0/SPARC workstations. I think the latter could run DOS and maybe Windows programs.
The East coast engineers who developed the 386i also came up with a number of enhancements to SunView, such as its nifty hypertext online help system.
Earlier still Sun tried to network the fence when the acquired TOPS, a company that sold a fairly nice networking layer for Macs and later PCs. But they attempted and failed a marketing-driven merge of TOPS and NFS. At the time networking PCs was an unreliable joke. Sun could have been Netware, delivering reliable popular printer and file sharing for PCs running Microsoft OS! They could have used that market success to drive additional network innovations built on their RPC layer. But Windows for Workgroups would have nonetheless begun the inevitable decline of non-MS networking software.
If downloading copyrighted material isn't illegal, the files will be plaintext, so just have network monitoring at points watching the files go by.
The "but I only use teh Intartubes for e-mail/blogging/exchanging scientific data sets" is a tiny minority, and well, tough! I guarantee in a democracy "Your ISP bill just went up 15% but you can download anything and everything anytime (and artists get paid)" would be an overwhelmingly popular solution for consumers, voters, artists, and a few enlightened media companies.
the ludicrous idea of an overarching broadband fee
How exactly is that ludicrous? If you paid a 15-20% surcharge on your ISP fee to download anything and everything anytime and the money went to artists on a straight popularity basis (easily monitored at the network level), all kinds of good things would happen.
The devil is in the details. A good system would render record labels and TV networks obsolete so they would fight it. But it's a great solution.
The EFF has suggested something similar, a $5/month Voluntary Collective Licensing Fee. Making it voluntary is fantasy (and I say that as one of a handful of people who actually gave money to FairTunes each time I made an MP3 for friends). Making it a percentage of broadband cost (so someone on DSL pays less than broadband, and dial-up less still) is fairer than the subscription model Rick Rubin proposes in the NYTimes article, and making it compulsory makes DRM irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
If you select then choose View Selection Source from the context menu, Firefox does not seem to re-request the page. It shows th actual HTML behind the selection, including dynamically modified and generated code. I'm no expert but it's definitely different behavior.
So Ctrl-A to select all, right-click, then View Selection Source.
I hope this helps. Thanks in advance for your insulting retort.
Wikipedia is much worse for Google than a popular site in search results that doesn't use AdSense. Increasingly users will bypass Google search to go directly to Wikipedia. In both Firefox and Opera Mini 4 on my phone, I set up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s quick searches; so I can jump directly to the Wikipedia article on any unfamiliar topic or acronym like 'w Tub girl'. I find I use it as much as Google search. The refrain "justfuckinggoogleit.com" is being replaced with "read the damn Wikipedia article first", and that is hugely threatening to Google.
What will kill Knol is spammers. If one person can copy a Wikipedia article into a knol, a thousand spammers will, each inserting a single link to another pointless web page in their endless halls of mirrors. Already, Googling for a relatively popular phrase like 'Katana driver download' brings up matches from garbled splogs[**] on blogspot.com.
[**] Don't google for 'splog', use your quick search bookmarklet
Thanks for making my point. We have made it to Mars. Spirit and Opportunity are up there right now, doing our bidding. If you don't find that more inspirational than pipeline robots, you need to turn in your geek card ;-) I'm not disparaging the romance of humans on Mars, but robots throughout the solar system for 5% the cost is cheaper faster better.
(Indeed I anthropomorphize the hell out of the little guys. I love it, JPL loves it, and I maintain most people under 40 would do so too if NASA changed its focus.)
I've got 3.5 GB in "My Music", 95% of it .aac files of CDs I own ripped via iTunes. I've copied it to my Buffalo Linkstation NAS, but I can't access it all while away from home or with friends (I listen to a subset off my cellphone's 2GB SD card). The obvious solution is to give the NAS a static IP and put an HTTP server on it.
;-)
I believe that's a substantial non-infringing use of a shared folder. And it allows distribution to anyone who discovers (or to whom I disclose) its URL. But why should I care if others break the law accessing my files? The only downside to me is if strangers over-consume my resources and ISP bandwidth.
1. Has the MafIAA ever gone after someone for having a shared folder? I'm not talking about P2P networks, just a network-accessible folder containing copyrighted material.
2. Surely there are lots of Slashdot geeks who have such a set up already, how's it working out for you? Can you sleep at night? Did you put a password on the folder? Can you give me its URL?
Neither you or I is going to vacation on another planet. So what's more inspiring?:
a) Looking up at the moon and knowing "Humans played golf and drove cars up there"
b) Looking up at Mars and knowing "Our 'little avatars that could' are driving around up there"
? a) is somewhat more fun, but not worth 100x the cost.
G1G1 donors (like me) also got 1 year of free T-Mobile Hotspot access, which is about $360 value, so the value received for your $400 is more than the $400, so no charitable deduction.
The entire OLPC model is causing problems at this point, EeePC just completely stole the market from them with a better device, quicker.
Your comment makes no sense at all. OLPC is an education project. How many large deals with education ministries has EeePC landed? Different computers for different markets.
It is obvious that the "One Laptop Per Child in developing countries" market is slow and tough going, but OLPC adding a consumer focus would be an enormous distraction. And the moderate success of Give One Get One shows that there ISN'T a huge USA consumer market for the XO.
The XO machine works, the hardware and software developers continue to do an excellent job, some education roll-outs are happening, the free content and activities created for the project are just getting started and will be GREAT for education. Give the project time!
The initial Mars Rover mission cost less than a billion dollars, compared with $130 billion to put astronauts in the International Space Station near earth to little purpose, and a similar 12-digit price tag for the shuttle.
So why do politicians and NASA spend 100x to put a human in the tin can? Besides the self-perpetuating vast sums of money involved, I think they're old and out-of-touch. They have a romantic attachment to manned space flight, while everyone under 40 finds it completely natural to project a presence miles away while sitting at the controls in a dark room.
Is there a politician saying "Elect me and I pledge to abandon manned exploration to focus instead on landing autonomous craft on every planet in the solar system. Let commercial ventures and other countries fight for 300th person in Earth orbit and second place on the moon. We'll go new places cheaper faster and better."
?
Great, a bunch of lazy-ass /.ers repeatedly quoting a line that's correctly ranked a Score:0 post because it contradicts TFA.
TFA by the BBC guy says: "For applications that run internally we use Ruby on Rail. [sic]"
So true. As part of my solar PV installation, I got a net use meter. Instead of that pathetic stupid antique spinning disk that requires a stopwatch and a calculator, I've got an LCD showing instantaneous consumption in kiloWatts. So every time I walk in or out I check my consumption. Any time it's above 1 kW I try to figure out why. I soon realized the downstairs track lights eat 400 Watts, so I leave them off. It pointed out that when a vacuum cleaner brags about stupendous suction power, that means high electric consumption, so I don't leave it running while moving the furniture and changing attachments. It reminds me to activate standby and switch off my computer power strip. It shows that my Sub-Zero fridge is a beautiful piece of inefficient constantly-running crap. Etc. etc. If every house had one, consumption would take a quick dive.
It's still flawed:
Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on.
Solar panels are almost maintenance-free. Wiping the dust off occasionally boosts efficiency slightly. And if they track the sun, the mechanism might break down. From my experience with my solar PV panels, that's IT.
And you don't need land, you need flat roofs. Start with big warehouses in the Southwest.
So I have Flac installed in C:\Program Files\FLAC and I dutifully installed the new version, which DIDN'T seem to install a new libFLAC anywhere, just a new flac.exe
;-)
But I also have copies of libFLAC.dll in C:\Program Files\guliverkli\oggcodecs, and C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\plugins. The web sites for Media Player Classic ("guliverkli") and VideoLAN indicate I have the latest Windows version and neither mentions this vulnerability.
This is probably cruft that I accumulated trying to play various media files from the IntarWubwubwub. "Just click to _download this plugin_ and play this format!" Great, now it's a year later and I don't know where they all came from. I think one came from http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/ , but that was last updated 2006-02-24 (and again, no mention of this vulnerability).
F*** it, I'll just delete every file matching libflac*.dll and see what happens. But the various Windows free media players could sure do a better job with all the money I give them
Linux package management seems *better* than random untracked installs and downloads in Windows.
Offer it on Craigslist for free or stupid cheap, immediately .
Don't put it in the garage, don't think "Maybe I'll put Linux on that" or "It'll be good to have for parts and backup" Just DITCH it.
The half-life of electronics is so short that just putting it aside for a month makes it worthless. Try giving away the 16MB flash memory that came with your phone or camera, you can't. Your old printer won't be supported soon. The software you didn't need becomes software no one wants.
The act of writing "You can come by this weekend to pick it up" forces you to back up the data, find the box, and get it ready. If you put it off, you're trashing your old tech.
When someone e-mails you an evil Office attachment, upload it to Google Docs, http://docs.google.com and remail everyone a link to your version. Some smarter recipients will realize they can browse and collaborate on your version and still save it locally (in Office and ODF formats). Eventually Office gets marginalized, along with the moronic drudges that use its tool set inappropriately .
As a wise man once said: "I'm trying to ban e-mail attachments. I just want an ASCII e-mail. If you want to show me something, put it in a Web page, publish it, give me the URL, and I'll look at it. That's the new model."Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in May 1997 Upside magazine.
Sorry, you're wrong. Excessive tracking weight does not compress the music in the sense of this article. It leads to tracking distortion and an altered frequency response.
Microsoft knows that if they break backward computability people will scream. And they do scream.
Microsoft used to care about backwards compatibility, now... not so much. Office 2000 doesn't work well on Vista (mail merge broken), Outlook 2000 has problems (MS changed the Windows Address Book protocol. Many older USB drivers don't work on Vista. MS is not stupid, they figure out how much pain an upgrade can inflict vs. how much they'll get from forced software updates vs. the effort required vs. how many users will reject the update. Other software vendors like Adobe go along; why should they care about my problems running Fireworks 4 on Vista?
What blows my mind is how many people unthinkingly accept the idea that any software more than 5 years old is unlikely to still work. Backwards compatibility is hard but far from impossible, back in the Windows 3.0 and 95 days MS made extreme efforts because they wanted to move people to Windows.
The site you cite
Have I told you lately that I love yooooouuu?
I can only assume we have some impact. Is it 100% our fault? I find that difficult to believe given that we have not been collecting data for very long and we occupy such an insignificant amount of the surface of this planet it is ridiculous.
Who is moderating your "assuming" and "believing" unreferenced no-citation mindgames as Insightful? The activities of 6 billion people emit vast quantities of CO2 (5,410 million metric tons per year from the USA alone), enough to account for the large, unprecedented, accelerating increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. You would expect by the simple well-understood physics of the greenhouse gas effect that this might have a warming effect. Which of those do you find difficult to believe? Why should anyone care?
From those observed phenomena and scientific principles, it's all up to climate scientists to model the effects on the atmosphere, NOT base it on what people feel.
Don't pretend that your armchair analysis is balanced or reasonable. "to me it's clear there's NOT scientific consensus on the _cause_ of global warming or what's going to happen 50 years from now" The IPCC report is the consensus:
"Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."
Footnotes on page 4 of the summary indicate very likely and likely mean "the assessed likelihood, using expert judgment", are over 90% and 66% respectively.
(IPCC Report #4)
The ideas behind this are applicable to any O.S. and there are proposed standard ATA commands to manipulate the Non-Volatile cache, see http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D1699r4b-ATA8-ACS.pdf. I hope Linux and Mac hackers are working on it.
I'm not sure if the drive takes advantage of NV cache without specific O.S. support. Even without O.S. support, the drive could decide "You keep reading blocks X Y and Z, so I'll store them in NV cache" (drives already do this with their conventional RAM cache, typically 8MB) and "I'll keep your pending data writes in NV cache while waiting for the disk to spin up".
Windows Vista's ReadyDrive takes specific advantage of this feature: "During shutdown or hibernate all the disk sectors needed to boot or resume are pinned into the NV cache... Offsets within files and/or specific LBAs can be specified by the PC OEM in registry for pinning in the NV Cache". I converted the MS PowerPoint presentation http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dcvvrqtp_13gj635t&fs=true (yay Google Docs, die PowerPoint DIE!).
Two college kids set up Fairtunes (Salon article) during the Napster heyday so music downloaders could contribute money directly to musicians. They received a pittance in donations despite a lot of publicity.
Fairtunes was divorced from the act of grabbing an MP3 from Napster, so perhaps the people who claimed they weren't pirates and intended to donate money conveniently never got around to paying. Maybe by making the donation part of the download process, Radiohead will get more people to pay a decent price... but I wouldn't bet on people's ethics on the Internet.
As many people already corrected, you can save a Zip file to your drive that contains the entire presentation that you can run in your browser. Sheesh.
You're confusing the 386i with the 386 co-processor board that Sun made available for its 680x0/SPARC workstations. I think the latter could run DOS and maybe Windows programs.
The East coast engineers who developed the 386i also came up with a number of enhancements to SunView, such as its nifty hypertext online help system.
Sun also tried to straddle the fence with WABI, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Application_Binary_Interface , an early WINE-like attempt to reimplement the Windows ABI for SunOS and later Linux.
Earlier still Sun tried to network the fence when the acquired TOPS, a company that sold a fairly nice networking layer for Macs and later PCs. But they attempted and failed a marketing-driven merge of TOPS and NFS. At the time networking PCs was an unreliable joke. Sun could have been Netware, delivering reliable popular printer and file sharing for PCs running Microsoft OS! They could have used that market success to drive additional network innovations built on their RPC layer. But Windows for Workgroups would have nonetheless begun the inevitable decline of non-MS networking software.
If downloading copyrighted material isn't illegal, the files will be plaintext, so just have network monitoring at points watching the files go by.
The "but I only use teh Intartubes for e-mail/blogging/exchanging scientific data sets" is a tiny minority, and well, tough! I guarantee in a democracy "Your ISP bill just went up 15% but you can download anything and everything anytime (and artists get paid)" would be an overwhelmingly popular solution for consumers, voters, artists, and a few enlightened media companies.
How exactly is that ludicrous? If you paid a 15-20% surcharge on your ISP fee to download anything and everything anytime and the money went to artists on a straight popularity basis (easily monitored at the network level), all kinds of good things would happen.
The devil is in the details. A good system would render record labels and TV networks obsolete so they would fight it. But it's a great solution.
The EFF has suggested something similar, a $5/month Voluntary Collective Licensing Fee. Making it voluntary is fantasy (and I say that as one of a handful of people who actually gave money to FairTunes each time I made an MP3 for friends). Making it a percentage of broadband cost (so someone on DSL pays less than broadband, and dial-up less still) is fairer than the subscription model Rick Rubin proposes in the NYTimes article, and making it compulsory makes DRM irrelevant.