I've always been confused about why we use drugs to begin with. Nitrogen asphyxiation works painlessly, there is no suffocation, the person just falls asleep and a few minutes later is brain dead. The room doesn't even need to be pressurized, just well sealed. Lead the person in, sit them down and secure them, then leave and turn on the nitrogen. Few minutes later, during which he is free to say his last words, he falls asleep and dies a few minutes later.
Why bother upgrading, just to run all my applications from inside the desktop app? Sure the fast boot would be nice, and being able to mount iso's, but thats not worth the extra hassle.
I swear Dark Matter is the 'God did it' of the physics world. Can't explain something, Dark Matter is the reason! Can't find a cause, Dark Matter is it! Can't explain Dark Matter, we got Dark Energy! Can't explain Dark Energy, its Dark Matter!
Use the gentlest cleanser you can (the cleaner they sell for lcd televisions works pretty well), a microfiber cloth (not wet, just damp), and go over it once, let it dry, go over it again, let it dry, then a little bit of sunshine really does help kill germs.
Thankfully the flashblock addon was just updated to support firefox 3 beta 5. Since I only allow flash to run from a few sites, I'm not worried about any such exploit.
I've been a big fan of flashblock, ever since realizing that most flash developers assume 100% volume is mid range, and I assume 50%, and every flash website without volume controls rips through my ears like a buzzsaw.
This is an example of the linking in slashdot that drives me crazy.
In this: I found this New Scientist article interesting, as I was actually alive (albeit very small) when Bikini Atoll was H-bombed. The article says that the reason the reefs are now flourishing is..
Why is 'Bikini Atoll was H-bombed' linked, which would mean that clicking on it would lead to information about the bombing?
Why isn't 'this New Scientist article' or even 'The article says' the linked words?
In slashdot entries with a number of links, I can rarely tell what to click on, because of inane references like this.
I read the article, and it referred to Boxer's quest for documents via the Freedom of Information Act, but this doesn't mention the California lawsuit, or the preserve-documents order that is related to it.
As near as I can tell, this is only related to Boxer's environmental committee request for information, and is not in response to the lawsuit. In fact, I think it may be a test to see if it might be a viable response to the lawsuit as well. If it works for the congressional request, they might try it out in the courts.
Let Intel know what you think
on
Negroponte vs Intel
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
From Intel's website:
Corporate Mailing Address
2200 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1549
USA
(408) 765-8080
A phone call or a snail mail letter will go a long way toward letting Intel know it crossed the line.
Basicly, make an electric car with a 50-100 mile range, something the size of a civic or a prius, then have a hookup on the back where you can attach a small diesel generator on wheels. Just like the small trailers you see for moving, but this would generate the power needed to 'hybridize' the vehicle, but you don't need to have it hooked up the vast majority of running around town you do. Also, one generator could serve a whole group of vehicles, or maybe even make them rentable for trips.
I am with the other skeptics. The article says they found evidence of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Fine, but this isn't 'evidence of dark energy' any more than a misplaced car is evidence of auto theft.
As for gravity.. gravity is a force. If not countered by another force, it causes acceleration. In fact, acceleration is caused by the net force on an object. Your weight is the tension caused by the countering forces of gravity, and the molecular bindings of what you're standing/sitting/laying on resisting.
Now, as for the universe expansion. Objects further away from us are moving away from us, faster, the further they are. Imagine being stuck on the middle of a piece of elastic that is being stretched, and seeing how fast various spots are travelling away from your spot. Due to the quirk of einsteinian space, from each 'edge' of the universe, the other edge seems to be moving away at very close to the speed of light. From the middle, both edges seem to be moving away at near the speed of light. Just not as near. (There is an infinite amount of measurement in 'nearness' to the speed of light. No matter how near you are, you can always get nearer.)
Now, if gravity is the predominant force, the velocity (near the speed of light) of these far distant objects would be getting farther from the speed of light, slowing down. If there was no predominant force, each spot on the elastic would keep going away from us at that constant speed. And if there was a countervailing force, the speed would keep going up as they left us.
Now, because scientists are throwing dark energy and dark matter around like so many bad ideas that make good t-shirt designs (anybody remember chaos theory?), I am unsure if they mean that the universe, while slowing down its expansion, will never reach zero and then reverse (ie, it will achieve escape velocity.. no matter how long, even if the expansion slows, will it ever stop). This, to me is not 'accelerated'. Even if there is a countering force that is preventing gravity from being as effective as it can at slowing things down.
Alternatively, if not only is the universe not going to close, the relative velocities are actually increasing over time, then the universe is going downhill fast. (and faster, and faster)
As for the people talking about space itself moving, they are misusing concepts that apply only when there is a great amount of mass in one place, like the early universe. Mass has the ability to drag spacetime with it (since spacetime really is a product of mass anyway, remember the rubber sheet idea?) Unless the vast majority of mass in the universe is at the rim, this has no significant affect. (and, in fact, the universe has some pretty decent mass dispersion.. the variation is incredibly, incredibly, minute. Almost every direction you look in has the same amount of mass.)
This stuff is making me tired. Come on, every single time humans have sets of information, the primary interface funcions are: go forward through it, go back, go to a set place.
Card catalogs, books, EVERYTHING. It has nothing to do with interface development or evolution, its because we're human and how we think.
As science pushes boundaries, especially ones that directly involve human organisms, lawmakers are getting involved before they even know what science can do.
For example, cloning. Cloning, at its most basic, just creates a twin. There are no harvest-organs or implant-brain implications that don't involve other laws (murder) already. Yet, somehow, the ones who are deciding what we should or shouldn't do, the politicians, are looking at it from a movie-plot perspective.
Another, the space station. A public relations project, but not one endorsed by any true space enthusiast I know of. We'd all like projects that get us closer to a manned presence on the moon, or better/cheaper/faster/safer orbital access. The shuttle is a massively wasteful, unsafe, way to get to orbit.
Why don't we have a hydrogen economy *already*?
So how can we as a society pick a better way to influence research? How can we pick better people to draw the lines of where we should go or not go?
Firstly, I waited over 8 months for SMAC before cancelling, playing the demo got really boring after a while. The delay was not something I understood, because the game was finished, it was just waiting for them to get the packaging right, aparently.
Secondly, the majority of their games were things the windows platform was supplying better. The games were out on windows sooner, with better hardware support. First person shooters may be some people's idea of the entire gaming industry these days, but not mine. Over half of Loki's lineup is composed of these titles, titles which sell like mad when first released but then drop off sharply when the next FPS comes out. With little staying power, how could they be expected to last long enough to be in strong demand once Loki got around to releasing them?
I really think they would have done better offering the games as downloads, without packaging.
Of the the two games I approached from loki, CivCTP was a disappointing sequel to CivII, and SMAC I got tired of waiting for. On the other hand, outside of Loki, I bought Creatures 3 because of linux support, and I'm going to buy NWN because of linux support as well.
Releasing something as unpredictably huge as a massively-multiplayer roleplaying game is a horribly complicated affair. Suddenly, resources get slammed with not twice, not triple, but orders of magnitude more demands. And while I'm sure many network and software engineers would sneer and say they could manage theoretical scalability problems of this order easily, they either lying to themselves or not going to work for these companies.
The only MMRPG launce without massive problems on this scale was Asheron's Call, which had such lackluster sales, that they didn't have the same scaling problems.
I knew as soon as soon such a hotly-demanded game like Anarchy Online came out that tons of idiots would expect a bug-free game, when not even online game makers can provide such these days, and then bemoan about how horrible the company is working to fix *their* problem *NOW*.
I've have been trying to play AO since it started, and in just a week, they fixed a whole heck of a lot, and in the next few weeks, I expect them to fix more. When EQ launched, it was horrendously worse than AO is now.
Agreed. They got some really key points of the book completely wrong.
Gurney was one of the best swordsmen in the universe.
The attempt on Paul's life was part of the Baron's plans, and the man who ran the seeker committed suicide.
There was no mention of the Orange Catholic Bible, the Butlerian jihad, and the tech was off. (No glo globes following people around, for one)
Jessica was alot haughtier in the book (she dared to betray the bene for her duke), and paul was much more reserved, so the characters are off.
When Liet sacrificed himself for Paul by staying behind, it was because he recognized in Paul the possibility of saving Dune and his people the fremen.
And WTF was up with the Princess visit? Did one of the producers want his daughter to have a bigger role? In the book, it never happened.
At that point, basicly, it became apparent that they paid only lip service to the plot, and wanted to twist the story to campy adventure-story ends with romantic twists and all.
You see it all the time, demanding that you admit that the way we do things is wrong. That we drive cars with wheels, that telephones shouldn't need numbers, and so forth.
But the fact of the matter is this: market forces determine how technology is used, and it has been seen the past 20 years that nobody will pay for user interface.
What the growing use of computers has produced is people who are sick of forced obsolecence, that is why linux is so compelling. Move your documents to linux, and you NEVER EVER have to 'import' them again. All the file formats are open.
Nobody is going to design a replacement for the way we store information in files. The investment we have is so huge, that just Y2K's update caused a perceptable effect on the ecomony of the most wealthy nation in the world. What will happen is that systems will NOT get more complex, more intelligent, because those things invariably break down and become impossible to use. People are more inclined to interact with simple things.
What will happen is that computers will get better at being dumb. They will process things faster, and more of them, use more files, and so forth. And tools will continue to follow the current trends, to try and organize what is essentially incapable of being catagorized.
I use napster myself, but most of the things I grab are songs that I remember, that touched me, and most are popular, major label songs. And I'm definitely not replacing music consumption, when I love an artist, I buy their CD, even sometimes popular ones.
My real love though, is music I don't listen to all the time. Its not stuff I put on in the background, its stuff from very minor artists and groups who tend to make their money through performances, and not the CD's they sell online. But I have the complete CD collection of Uncle Bonsai, and you CANNOT find them in a store.
So do I go to napster? No, I go to their web, where I find they are banded together with other artists who tend to play the same scenes. I find, wow, there is a sampler CD. I buy that, find the artists I love, and start to expand that way.
Now that is the ONLY way to spread music. To make it accessable to those who haven't heard it before. But they won't want to hear it, unless they think they will like it. Alot of my favorite stuff I heard from friends who shared it with me. The only way artists are going to spread their music around is by making sharing smiliar tastes easier on their online access points.
But they aren't doing it. Like artists everywhere they are making really obscure, badly designed, completely unusable, very pretty web sites. At least the majority are. The few that aren't have a pretty continuing fan base, and if they start to do a little creative marketing (bring sampler CD's of themselves with other artists they like to distribute at performances, cards with web urls and so forth), they might find better success.
The internet takes a change in perspective to take advantage of. Its the only medium where spreading other people's stuff and relating it to yours is advantagous.
As much as I like Jon's other articles, I'm going to have to agree with many of the others in this forum. I'm really glad the internet was almost completely unexpected by the media, or it would never have been allowed to exist.
If we are not prepared for this development, can you define what would qualify us as being prepared? As a society, we have already explored the possible consequences of this discovery in fiction (ever visit the scifi section?), and despite the ignorance-slanted portrayal of what this discovery could mean for us as a species, the only way to become more 'wise' is to go through exactly these kind of trials.
Look at it this way.. which world would you rather live in, one where people never had to suffer throught he humiliation of a colostomy bag again (because colon cancer is treatable if spoted early, and genetic tests can do this), or a world in which we let the fear of the policies of insurance companies, employers, or governments rule us?
Sure, while we change a few errors in our genetic code, we'll have to change a few things in our society. So whats the big deal?
Right now, music publishing companies are artificially maintaining higher prices. To clearly illustrate this, consider a car made by toyota and one made by hand by a good mechanic. Companies are designed to mass produce things more efficiently, yet I can buy a CD from an unsigned artists for 50-60% of one from a music store.
Now, because of this use of an effective monopoly, there really is no alternative but to buy product from them, this makes boycotting impossible. The music industry works together as a whole, there really is no other source of Metallica CD's. If I like the color blue, I can go boycott one brand of paint and buy another, but no consortium is trying to fix the price of blue paint.
This exact situation happened when vhs tapes started selling, at really high prices. Piracy exploded, but this time with no easy to find company to blame (and there WERE great distribution networks for these). The prices came down, and the piracy subsided.
Now, the music and movie industries are trying to get around this problem, by upping the copy difficulty (the other means of preventing duplication of something of value), through use of technology and law. But historicly, these have severe limitations over time as well. (laws get changed, or invalidated, newer technology comes along).
And frankly, metallica is as much the victim here as the consumers, because it is trying to fight something it mistakenly sees as wrong.
One of the main reasons I like mp3's is because I can have a large variety of songs, in large amounts, readily available for me on my hard drive. It's like our own personal juke box, but instead of a few songs we like, we like all of them because we chose them.
I think the main problem is micropayments. An exec looks at how much a single song is worth, a buck (or two for the first 6 months of release or so), and can't figure out a way to sell them. A buck charge to a credit card would get eaten up in fees.
What I'm wondering is why no music publisher has set up a site selling their songs in groups of 10-20. You download 10 songs, but when you want the 11th, you have to pay for the first 10. That way they can make everybody happy. (by seeming to give away a few songs, but being able to charge for an 'album' worth at a time to those who want more)
I was really disappointed when I found out how limited the initial showing would be. There was originally an intent to show it 'on 1000 screens', accross the US, but now thats been trimmed down to a handful for testing purposes.
I really hope it does well, though, or if not comes to sale on vidio/dvd quickly. The trip for me and my friends from Las Vegas to Pheonix (taking 10 hours including the movie) just isn't worth it.
Its long past due for market pressures to start forcing music publishers to sell for a reasonable price. There is no way a music CD, which costs a quarter to make (including case), should sell for 6000% its value. At most, we should be paying $5 for them.
Maybe chinese music publisers will realize that they can undercut the cost of CDR blanks (and the pain of burning copies and distributing them) and start selling Cd's for a few bucks (in much greater quantity).
But nah, that would make too much sense. And it would also fulfill the promise the music industry made to us so long ago (cd's being so much cheaper to make than cassettes). And last thing they want to do is act responsably.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.usbbutton.com/
I've always been confused about why we use drugs to begin with. Nitrogen asphyxiation works painlessly, there is no suffocation, the person just falls asleep and a few minutes later is brain dead. The room doesn't even need to be pressurized, just well sealed. Lead the person in, sit them down and secure them, then leave and turn on the nitrogen. Few minutes later, during which he is free to say his last words, he falls asleep and dies a few minutes later.
Why bother upgrading, just to run all my applications from inside the desktop app? Sure the fast boot would be nice, and being able to mount iso's, but thats not worth the extra hassle.
I swear Dark Matter is the 'God did it' of the physics world. Can't explain something, Dark Matter is the reason! Can't find a cause, Dark Matter is it! Can't explain Dark Matter, we got Dark Energy! Can't explain Dark Energy, its Dark Matter!
Use the gentlest cleanser you can (the cleaner they sell for lcd televisions works pretty well), a microfiber cloth (not wet, just damp), and go over it once, let it dry, go over it again, let it dry, then a little bit of sunshine really does help kill germs.
Thankfully the flashblock addon was just updated to support firefox 3 beta 5. Since I only allow flash to run from a few sites, I'm not worried about any such exploit.
I've been a big fan of flashblock, ever since realizing that most flash developers assume 100% volume is mid range, and I assume 50%, and every flash website without volume controls rips through my ears like a buzzsaw.
This is an example of the linking in slashdot that drives me crazy.
In this:
I found this New Scientist article interesting, as I was actually alive (albeit very small) when Bikini Atoll was H-bombed. The article says that the reason the reefs are now flourishing is..
Why is 'Bikini Atoll was H-bombed' linked, which would mean that clicking on it would lead to information about the bombing?
Why isn't 'this New Scientist article' or even 'The article says' the linked words?
In slashdot entries with a number of links, I can rarely tell what to click on, because of inane references like this.
I read the article, and it referred to Boxer's quest for documents via the Freedom of Information Act, but this doesn't mention the California lawsuit, or the preserve-documents order that is related to it.
As near as I can tell, this is only related to Boxer's environmental committee request for information, and is not in response to the lawsuit. In fact, I think it may be a test to see if it might be a viable response to the lawsuit as well. If it works for the congressional request, they might try it out in the courts.
From Intel's website:
Corporate Mailing Address
2200 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1549
USA
(408) 765-8080
A phone call or a snail mail letter will go a long way toward letting Intel know it crossed the line.
Dan's Data had a great idea that solved the range problem for electric cars. http://www.dansdata.com/modularcar.htm
Basicly, make an electric car with a 50-100 mile range, something the size of a civic or a prius, then have a hookup on the back where you can attach a small diesel generator on wheels. Just like the small trailers you see for moving, but this would generate the power needed to 'hybridize' the vehicle, but you don't need to have it hooked up the vast majority of running around town you do. Also, one generator could serve a whole group of vehicles, or maybe even make them rentable for trips.
I am with the other skeptics. The article says they found evidence of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Fine, but this isn't 'evidence of dark energy' any more than a misplaced car is evidence of auto theft.
As for gravity.. gravity is a force. If not countered by another force, it causes acceleration. In fact, acceleration is caused by the net force on an object. Your weight is the tension caused by the countering forces of gravity, and the molecular bindings of what you're standing/sitting/laying on resisting.
Now, as for the universe expansion. Objects further away from us are moving away from us, faster, the further they are. Imagine being stuck on the middle of a piece of elastic that is being stretched, and seeing how fast various spots are travelling away from your spot. Due to the quirk of einsteinian space, from each 'edge' of the universe, the other edge seems to be moving away at very close to the speed of light. From the middle, both edges seem to be moving away at near the speed of light. Just not as near. (There is an infinite amount of measurement in 'nearness' to the speed of light. No matter how near you are, you can always get nearer.)
Now, if gravity is the predominant force, the velocity (near the speed of light) of these far distant objects would be getting farther from the speed of light, slowing down. If there was no predominant force, each spot on the elastic would keep going away from us at that constant speed. And if there was a countervailing force, the speed would keep going up as they left us.
Now, because scientists are throwing dark energy and dark matter around like so many bad ideas that make good t-shirt designs (anybody remember chaos theory?), I am unsure if they mean that the universe, while slowing down its expansion, will never reach zero and then reverse (ie, it will achieve escape velocity.. no matter how long, even if the expansion slows, will it ever stop). This, to me is not 'accelerated'. Even if there is a countering force that is preventing gravity from being as effective as it can at slowing things down.
Alternatively, if not only is the universe not going to close, the relative velocities are actually increasing over time, then the universe is going downhill fast. (and faster, and faster)
As for the people talking about space itself moving, they are misusing concepts that apply only when there is a great amount of mass in one place, like the early universe. Mass has the ability to drag spacetime with it (since spacetime really is a product of mass anyway, remember the rubber sheet idea?) Unless the vast majority of mass in the universe is at the rim, this has no significant affect. (and, in fact, the universe has some pretty decent mass dispersion.. the variation is incredibly, incredibly, minute. Almost every direction you look in has the same amount of mass.)
This stuff is making me tired. Come on, every single time humans have sets of information, the primary interface funcions are: go forward through it, go back, go to a set place.
Card catalogs, books, EVERYTHING. It has nothing to do with interface development or evolution, its because we're human and how we think.
Stop posting articles about idiots spouting off.
Is it just me, or is slashdot doing little more than copying BoingBoing threads?
Come on, UK slot machines is 'News for Nerds'?
As science pushes boundaries, especially ones that directly involve human organisms, lawmakers are getting involved before they even know what science can do.
For example, cloning. Cloning, at its most basic, just creates a twin. There are no harvest-organs or implant-brain implications that don't involve other laws (murder) already. Yet, somehow, the ones who are deciding what we should or shouldn't do, the politicians, are looking at it from a movie-plot perspective.
Another, the space station. A public relations project, but not one endorsed by any true space enthusiast I know of. We'd all like projects that get us closer to a manned presence on the moon, or better/cheaper/faster/safer orbital access. The shuttle is a massively wasteful, unsafe, way to get to orbit.
Why don't we have a hydrogen economy *already*?
So how can we as a society pick a better way to influence research? How can we pick better people to draw the lines of where we should go or not go?
Firstly, I waited over 8 months for SMAC before cancelling, playing the demo got really boring after a while. The delay was not something I understood, because the game was finished, it was just waiting for them to get the packaging right, aparently.
Secondly, the majority of their games were things the windows platform was supplying better. The games were out on windows sooner, with better hardware support. First person shooters may be some people's idea of the entire gaming industry these days, but not mine. Over half of Loki's lineup is composed of these titles, titles which sell like mad when first released but then drop off sharply when the next FPS comes out. With little staying power, how could they be expected to last long enough to be in strong demand once Loki got around to releasing them?
I really think they would have done better offering the games as downloads, without packaging.
Of the the two games I approached from loki, CivCTP was a disappointing sequel to CivII, and SMAC I got tired of waiting for. On the other hand, outside of Loki, I bought Creatures 3 because of linux support, and I'm going to buy NWN because of linux support as well.
Releasing something as unpredictably huge as a massively-multiplayer roleplaying game is a horribly complicated affair. Suddenly, resources get slammed with not twice, not triple, but orders of magnitude more demands. And while I'm sure many network and software engineers would sneer and say they could manage theoretical scalability problems of this order easily, they either lying to themselves or not going to work for these companies.
The only MMRPG launce without massive problems on this scale was Asheron's Call, which had such lackluster sales, that they didn't have the same scaling problems.
I knew as soon as soon such a hotly-demanded game like Anarchy Online came out that tons of idiots would expect a bug-free game, when not even online game makers can provide such these days, and then bemoan about how horrible the company is working to fix *their* problem *NOW*.
I've have been trying to play AO since it started, and in just a week, they fixed a whole heck of a lot, and in the next few weeks, I expect them to fix more. When EQ launched, it was horrendously worse than AO is now.
Agreed. They got some really key points of the book completely wrong. Gurney was one of the best swordsmen in the universe. The attempt on Paul's life was part of the Baron's plans, and the man who ran the seeker committed suicide. There was no mention of the Orange Catholic Bible, the Butlerian jihad, and the tech was off. (No glo globes following people around, for one) Jessica was alot haughtier in the book (she dared to betray the bene for her duke), and paul was much more reserved, so the characters are off. When Liet sacrificed himself for Paul by staying behind, it was because he recognized in Paul the possibility of saving Dune and his people the fremen. And WTF was up with the Princess visit? Did one of the producers want his daughter to have a bigger role? In the book, it never happened. At that point, basicly, it became apparent that they paid only lip service to the plot, and wanted to twist the story to campy adventure-story ends with romantic twists and all.
You see it all the time, demanding that you admit
that the way we do things is wrong. That we drive
cars with wheels, that telephones shouldn't need
numbers, and so forth.
But the fact of the matter is this: market forces
determine how technology is used, and it has been
seen the past 20 years that nobody will pay for
user interface.
What the growing use of computers has produced is
people who are sick of forced obsolecence, that is
why linux is so compelling. Move your documents
to linux, and you NEVER EVER have to 'import' them
again. All the file formats are open.
Nobody is going to design a replacement for the
way we store information in files. The investment
we have is so huge, that just Y2K's update caused
a perceptable effect on the ecomony of the most
wealthy nation in the world. What will happen is
that systems will NOT get more complex, more
intelligent, because those things invariably break
down and become impossible to use. People are
more inclined to interact with simple things.
What will happen is that computers will get better
at being dumb. They will process things faster,
and more of them, use more files, and so forth.
And tools will continue to follow the current
trends, to try and organize what is essentially
incapable of being catagorized.
I use napster myself, but most of the things I
grab are songs that I remember, that touched me,
and most are popular, major label songs. And I'm
definitely not replacing music consumption, when
I love an artist, I buy their CD, even sometimes
popular ones.
My real love though, is music I don't listen to
all the time. Its not stuff I put on in the
background, its stuff from very minor artists and
groups who tend to make their money through
performances, and not the CD's they sell online.
But I have the complete CD collection of Uncle
Bonsai, and you CANNOT find them in a store.
So do I go to napster? No, I go to their web,
where I find they are banded together with other
artists who tend to play the same scenes. I find,
wow, there is a sampler CD. I buy that, find the
artists I love, and start to expand that way.
Now that is the ONLY way to spread music. To make
it accessable to those who haven't heard it
before. But they won't want to hear it, unless
they think they will like it. Alot of my favorite
stuff I heard from friends who shared it with me.
The only way artists are going to spread their
music around is by making sharing smiliar tastes
easier on their online access points.
But they aren't doing it. Like artists everywhere
they are making really obscure, badly designed,
completely unusable, very pretty web sites. At
least the majority are. The few that aren't have
a pretty continuing fan base, and if they start
to do a little creative marketing (bring sampler
CD's of themselves with other artists they like
to distribute at performances, cards with web urls
and so forth), they might find better success.
The internet takes a change in perspective to
take advantage of. Its the only medium where
spreading other people's stuff and relating it
to yours is advantagous.
As much as I like Jon's other articles, I'm going to have to agree with many of the others in this forum. I'm really glad the internet was almost completely unexpected by the media, or it would never have been allowed to exist.
If we are not prepared for this development, can you define what would qualify us as being prepared? As a society, we have already explored the possible consequences of this discovery in fiction (ever visit the scifi section?), and despite the ignorance-slanted portrayal of what this discovery could mean for us as a species, the only way to become more 'wise' is to go through exactly these kind of trials.
Look at it this way.. which world would you rather live in, one where people never had to suffer throught he humiliation of a colostomy bag again (because colon cancer is treatable if spoted early, and genetic tests can do this), or a world in which we let the fear of the policies of insurance companies, employers, or governments rule us?
Sure, while we change a few errors in our genetic code, we'll have to change a few things in our society. So whats the big deal?
Right now, music publishing companies are artificially maintaining higher prices. To clearly illustrate this, consider a car made by toyota and one made by hand by a good mechanic. Companies are designed to mass produce things more efficiently, yet I can buy a CD from an unsigned artists for 50-60% of one from a music store.
Now, because of this use of an effective monopoly, there really is no alternative but to buy product from them, this makes boycotting impossible. The music industry works together as a whole, there really is no other source of Metallica CD's. If I like the color blue, I can go boycott one brand of paint and buy another, but no consortium is trying to fix the price of blue paint.
This exact situation happened when vhs tapes started selling, at really high prices. Piracy exploded, but this time with no easy to find company to blame (and there WERE great distribution networks for these). The prices came down, and the piracy subsided.
Now, the music and movie industries are trying to get around this problem, by upping the copy difficulty (the other means of preventing duplication of something of value), through use of technology and law. But historicly, these have severe limitations over time as well. (laws get changed, or invalidated, newer technology comes along).
And frankly, metallica is as much the victim here as the consumers, because it is trying to fight something it mistakenly sees as wrong.
One of the main reasons I like mp3's is because I
can have a large variety of songs, in large amounts, readily available for me on my hard drive. It's like our own personal juke box, but instead of a few songs we like, we like all of them because we chose them.
I think the main problem is micropayments. An exec looks at how much a single song is worth, a buck (or two for the first 6 months of release or
so), and can't figure out a way to sell them. A buck charge to a credit card would get eaten up in fees.
What I'm wondering is why no music publisher has set up a site selling their songs in groups of 10-20. You download 10 songs, but when you want the 11th, you have to pay for the first 10. That way they can make everybody happy. (by seeming to give away a few songs, but being able to charge for an 'album' worth at a time to those who want more)
I was really disappointed when I found out how limited the initial showing would be. There was originally an intent to show it 'on 1000 screens', accross the US, but now thats been trimmed down to a handful for testing purposes.
I really hope it does well, though, or if not comes to sale on vidio/dvd quickly. The trip for me and my friends from Las Vegas to Pheonix (taking 10 hours including the movie) just isn't worth it.
Its long past due for market pressures to start forcing music publishers to sell for a reasonable price. There is no way a music CD, which costs a quarter to make (including case), should sell for 6000% its value. At most, we should be paying $5 for them.
Maybe chinese music publisers will realize that they can undercut the cost of CDR blanks (and the pain of burning copies and distributing them) and start selling Cd's for a few bucks (in much greater quantity).
But nah, that would make too much sense. And it would also fulfill the promise the music industry made to us so long ago (cd's being so much cheaper to make than cassettes). And last thing they want to do is act responsably.