Thanks for the link, it's a great article. It does seem to show however, that the 'move over' camp is in the majority even though a few states rule the other way, as does this compilation of rules linked in the article: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html. Based on the color code of that list, I'm guessing the guy who made it thinks driving the speed limit in the left lane is a bad idea. I tend to agree, but my OCD side really dislikes the idea of having to move over to allow somebody else to break the law. Therefore, I sort of like the 'you can do the speed limit in the left lane' idea, but only as a way to pressure governments to raise the speed limit. Unfortunately, it really doesn't work that way.
My take on that, is that as long as you are actually passing somebody, you have every right to remain in the passing lane, even if some %#^@*! wants to go 10 mph faster than you. However, once the lane to your right is clear for a reasonable distance, you must yield the passing lane, even if you think the guy behind you is going unreasonably fast. This is the law here in MA and I believe most states enforce "keep right except to pass". Driving the speed limit does not entitle you to the left lane, even though it's an apparent contradiction that the speeder behind you has the right to pass you.
For more perspective lets turn that into dollars. Where I live 1 KWh costs about $0.20 for residential service. That makes 59.3 KWh cost about $11.86. Pretending it takes exactly this much electricity to drive their claimed range of 320km (198.8 miles), gives a fuel cost of 6 cents per mile. Comparing to gasoline at about $2.45 a gallon, the cost is like driving at 41 MPG. Nice, but not revolutionary. If gas goes all the way back to $4.00/gallon, the cost is like driving at 66 mpg.
Seriously disagree. I started using iTunes nearly the moment both the iTMS and Windows support came together (late 2003), -exactly- to be able to buy music online, despite not owning any Apple hardware until just last year. Maybe today I'd start with Amazon or another competitor instead, but I don't think that's as much a certainty as you seem to think. My main criteria for choosing would be availability of the songs I want to buy, not whether not the software is pretty.
If so, why is the G-Map turn-by-turn GPS app for iPhone OS 3.0 a roughly 800MB download? Their maps are locally stored. I see on their FAQ that they claim to be the first app with locally stored maps, so perhaps this ability (no need for WiFi) has not been well publicized yet. If the reviews I've read were a little better I'd probably already own a copy.
Also, to be fair, I'm not 100% sure it does the route guidance locally, but if it has the maps local, why wouldn't it?
Wish I could mod you up. This the point the GP misses. All the scenarios he mentions are niches, which probably will not see the GPS being replaced by smartphones in the near future. However, if companies like Garmin et. al. have to go back to catering only to those niche markets, there will be a lot of bleeding to be done. The standalone GPS might as well go extinct for the amount of shrinkage its market will see.
[sarcasm off] For the record, I believe 100% that the landings were real, but I also believe that nothing short of dragging the conspiracy nuts up to the moon themselves will convince them of the fact. Maybe not even that.
Interesting ideas. I always through the term "recycling" was misleading because usually it's impossible to make the -same- item again. Recycling a plastic bottle should mean making -other bottles-, not some puke-gray ergonomically horrific park bench (just how many of those does the world actually need?) Of course, entropy being what it is, I don't expect anybody to be able to make a perfect one-to-one conversion, but most 'recycling' efforts don't even try. Other examples: used tires being ground into playground mulch, newspapers being turned into paper towels. These approaches are a nice start, but still, the material is basically being 'down-cycled' and eventually reaches a level where it's going to end up as landfill anyway.
I think I agree with you. My take, is that what you are describing is a 'real recovery', and a good thing. However, I am cynical enough to believe that many people in a position to influence the recovery have no desire to do that. They would rather try to pump blood from a stone until it's just impossible, and then they'll just leave the masses behind and move away (or gate themselves away). I don't think it's a done deal yet, but if the near future unfolded with the wealthy of America literally abandoning the country in a mass exodus, I wouldn't be surprised either.
Just consider the phrase you used: 'rearrangement of ability to spend'. I bet a lot people hear that and think Socialism. Never mind it might be in their long term best interest, if it means giving up something in the short term, they don't want anything to do with it.
Hear hear! Would mod you insightful but I'd rather comment this time. It's sad but true, that the 'recovery' we're looking for basically depends on the people who still have lots of money convincing the masses to go ahead and resume wasting theirs on things they really don't need at all. I'd almost rather see the recession continue indefinitely if it continues improving the saving rate of Americans or stops them from believing they need all the made-in-China crap that the marketing folks want them to buy.
I think you're also forgetting that HD-DVD was losing support from the US movie studios (a quick search shows Warner, Paramount and then Universal dropping HD-DVD in quick succession early last year - and somewhere in the middle of all that Toshiba announced they were ending production of HD-DVD products). I think by the time Toshiba gave in, their backs were against the wall and there really wasn't much else they could do. I'm not saying Sony didn't influence the defections, just that the 'payoff' isn't the whole story.
I agree with your comments almost 100%, especially in terms of movie prices. As I get older I discover the whole idea of owning movies is losing its luster. With all the choices we have these days for entertainment, it makes less and sense to buy movies you'll probably never watch again. I do make exceptions in a few cases: my kids and I find that almost all the Pixar movies have tons of replay value, so I don't mind buying them at full price (~$20) from time to time. I went out and bought the truly bizarre "Mr. Mike's Mondo Video" when it finally came out on DVD, because I was literally waiting decades for a chance to see it again.
That said, I've spent more money in the past few years buying used DVDs from the "buy two get one free" type bins at Gamestop, which basically makes the price closer to renting. (Sadly Gamestop has moved all their DVD inventory over to their separate Moviestop locations, and I don't find the deals there nearly as compelling.) I'm also a huge fan of Redbox which has finally provided a reasonably priced rental scheme and a truly convenient distribution system (I never understood why Blockbuster didn't use its size advantage to offer a 'rent anywhere return anywhere' system back when it had the chance).
My one disagreement with your comments is your holding out for PPC Mac support. Sorry, but that ship has sailed. A PPC Mac is no longer "perfectly good" the same way a 200 MHz Pentium PC is no longer "perfectly good" for much of anything. It's time to relegate your old MAC to web browsing and email and move on.
If I wasn't commenting in this thread I'd mod you up. Especially in terms of local interest/events, newspapers drive a lot of reporting. What's the alternative? Local TV news departments don't have the same depth today as the papers do. In my own experience local cable news outlets are marginally better (Just because a channel like NECN is on all day doesn't mean it isn't just repeating largely the same news hour after hour). I can't confirm this right now, but I believe even national news outlets like CNN.COM pick up stories from the AP wire. Newspapers and the reporting infrastructure they've created are a valuable resource even if dead-tree news delivery is a relic of the last century.
Absolutely, and if the industry collapses we won't even have those one or two reporters to provide the raw material. The walled garden business model might resurrect the industry but it also might fail in a world where too many people now -expect- content to be free or at worst ad supported. I don't have any idea which way it's going to go. I only object to the notion that the socialized/democratized Web 2.0 world is ready to pick up the slack. Someday it may, but right now the expectations far outstrip the reality. I think the previous reply to my comment summarizes the situation in a very colorful manner.
Sorry but I strongly disagree. You might call mainstream journalism crap, and some of the writing along with the various media biases are certainly worthy of that term, but the mainstream media is still the place where we get the boots on the ground to actually find out what's happening in the world. Take that away and I don't know how much 'reporting' the blogosphere can actually support.
Everyday the local metropolitan newspaper (in my case the Boston Globe) provides coverage of dozens and dozens of events that you'd be hard pressed to learn about through an RSS reader watching some random collection of local blogs. And where do the local bloggers find out about these events themselves? I suspect a large percentage write about things they themselves learned from the mainstream media, and only a tiny fraction are writing about things they experienced in person.
Anyway, your last question is framing the issue incorrectly. People are turning away from newspapers in favor of -identical quality- sources which happen to be free, because those sources have been able to appropriate and parrot the same content with ease.
The telescope is at a much higher altitude and probably also in a different orbital inclination. The change in velocity (delta-V) needed to get it to the same position as the ISS, -and- moving at the same direction and speed, is enormous. The shuttle doesn't have that kind of fuel. Not sure if -any- rocket we've put into orbit has ever carried enough fuel for that job. (If anything it would have been the rockets that took the Apollo astronauts out of Earth orbit and sent them toward the moon).
I believe that an excellent movie could have been made about Kirk's early days in the Starfleet, meeting Spock and the others, forming long lasting friendships and loyalties, with plenty of action etc... without resorting to the completely implausible.
I agree. I would enjoy seeing such a movie. Unfortunately, I think the payoff is too slow for most people, especially when we're talking about theatrical release. It would be a good way to start a new TV series, but there's plenty of evidence that the TV networks are too impatient for a show like that to build an audience.
No, seriously, who wants to watch blockbuster movies about the average Joe who has to slog through the ranks to make it to their rightful place in the grand scheme of things? That is 19/20th century "Horatio Hornblower" style writing. Kirk is a Superhero, who somehow ends up in command simply by force of personality and because it's his 'destiny' to do so.
Yes, it's completely implausible, but it's a valid form of story telling that isn't going to go away any time soon. People have liked "capitol-H" Heroes since the Greeks wrote stories about their gods.
Uh, multicasting might work great for live events, but how does it solve the video-on-demand problem? Are enough people looking to watch exactly the same pre-recorded video at exactly the same time for multicasting to really help?
The difference is that the "whining" that conservatives complained about was people wanting to be given something that was taken by force from someone else, whereas conservatives are "whining" about not being able to keep what actually belongs to them.
Well, I think it's not so clear cut what "actually belongs to them" considering all the shenanigans and manipulation of the legal system that people in power have been able to get away with over the last few decades. Robber barons may have had the law on their side at the time, but that doesn't necessarily make what they did morally correct. I personally believe that there are many cases where the rich have stolen from the masses, and perhaps it's time to get that money back where it belongs. Enron anyone? Why are taxes so high in the first place? I suspect it's often due to corrupt practices that take government money and hand it out like candy to well connected "whining conservatives".
you'd be more likely (if not all but forced) to visit the front pages of newspaper sites to get your news
Actually, I'm not very likely to do that. If it's not on CNN.COM, Time.com, Newsweek.com or other national/global sites, I'm just as likely to give up. I'm not going to start trolling through paper after paper (each one a walled garden of information) looking for content. I'm even less likely to pay a subscription fee to do so. In other words, I think the argument that 'if people can't use aggregators they'll come to us' is wishful thinking, when the third possibility is that the papers just drop off the radar entirely.
It doesn't help that the place where the papers should have the greatest strength, local news, has been a disappointment for me in the past. When something interesting happens today, I'd like to see it on the local newspaper web site -today-. Rarely happens. Newspapers seem to act as if stories don't need to be on the web until they're actually printed on dead trees first. If I'm lucky it will be posted tomorrow. If I'm not lucky it won't be posted at all since the public site has only a small subset of the newspaper's content. If it is posted eventually, I have the added aggravation of having to hunt it down quickly, because it's going to drop into the 'walled garden' in just a few days.
By the way, the papers might be including aggregators that provide nothing but links in their complaint, but I think their only hope is to focus on the ones like Google News that also provide 'fair use' snippets of the articles. Getting the snippets to stop might be the 'right' outcome anyway. I suspect that some papers -are- losing page views because people read the snippet and decide they've seen enough and don't need to click through. I'm pro fair use but I still want to see content creators survive and get paid.
The newspapers have no chance as far as I am concerned to convince a court that they should be paid just for linking. This is what I meant by 'the genie is out of the bottle'.
So yes, I am saying that aggregation of some sort will be legal indefinitely. But I also believe, that if I'm wrong and the papers get their way, they've just killed themselves so much the faster, if my behavior is typical of the public at large.
Nobody is 'pulling me away' from any newspaper web sites. I never start there to begin with. Say I want to learn more about a current event, like Obama's visit to Baghdad (just an example). My first instinct is to look at a global news site like cnn.com. If I come up blank on my favorite sites, then I try Google News, which might lead me to the New York Times if the content is there. Even though the NYT, for instance, might be a decent source of global news, it will never be the first place I look, because it just -seems- so limited. Newspaper sites never seem to update fast enough for my tastes.
I -do- occasionally read stories from Boston.com (my local paper website). Why? Because I've placed their gadget on my iGoogle page. Before iGoogle I hardly ever went there.
These days CNN is also acting as an aggregator of sorts, as many articles linked on its home page are actually news stories from local TV networks. Is anybody in TV-land complaining that cnn.com is stealing local station website eyeballs?
I don't see myself ever paying for digital delivery of a specific newspaper. Why limit myself to one view (and pay for it to boot) when the whole world is available out there with or without Google? Nobody's going to put that genie back in the bottle.
The newspapers need Google to lead eyeballs to their sites. They're just so desperate they expect to be paid on top of that. Schmidt has called their bluff by pointing out that they can opt out at any time.
This is the core of the matter. How many times does somebody say/think "This news was reported by a blogger", when what really happened was "This blogger wrote an entry online after reading a professional report somebody else was paid to create"? I seriously doubt that bloggers act as 'primary sources' of news reporting (meaning they are actually THERE, watching what's happening and writing original copy), more than 1% of the time, except for outlying events like technology conferences. For local news, like the three car accident that tied up I-95 for 6 hours last night, I'd suggest your chances of learning about that from a blog are very close to zero.
A balance needs to be struck somewhere. Content IS valuable. The 'fair use' crowd might be correct in this particular case, but what kind of victory is gained if we lose the content anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Compare to drug patents, where they are (generally - antibiotics perhaps excepted) still relevant and useful after the patent expires.
Silly me, I read that as "after the patient expires", in which case the drug patent has probably proved its uselessness, no?
Thanks for the link, it's a great article. It does seem to show however, that the 'move over' camp is in the majority even though a few states rule the other way, as does this compilation of rules linked in the article: http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html. Based on the color code of that list, I'm guessing the guy who made it thinks driving the speed limit in the left lane is a bad idea. I tend to agree, but my OCD side really dislikes the idea of having to move over to allow somebody else to break the law. Therefore, I sort of like the 'you can do the speed limit in the left lane' idea, but only as a way to pressure governments to raise the speed limit. Unfortunately, it really doesn't work that way.
My take on that, is that as long as you are actually passing somebody, you have every right to remain in the passing lane, even if some %#^@*! wants to go 10 mph faster than you. However, once the lane to your right is clear for a reasonable distance, you must yield the passing lane, even if you think the guy behind you is going unreasonably fast. This is the law here in MA and I believe most states enforce "keep right except to pass". Driving the speed limit does not entitle you to the left lane, even though it's an apparent contradiction that the speeder behind you has the right to pass you.
For more perspective lets turn that into dollars. Where I live 1 KWh costs about $0.20 for residential service. That makes 59.3 KWh cost about $11.86. Pretending it takes exactly this much electricity to drive their claimed range of 320km (198.8 miles), gives a fuel cost of 6 cents per mile. Comparing to gasoline at about $2.45 a gallon, the cost is like driving at 41 MPG. Nice, but not revolutionary. If gas goes all the way back to $4.00/gallon, the cost is like driving at 66 mpg.
Seriously disagree. I started using iTunes nearly the moment both the iTMS and Windows support came together (late 2003), -exactly- to be able to buy music online, despite not owning any Apple hardware until just last year. Maybe today I'd start with Amazon or another competitor instead, but I don't think that's as much a certainty as you seem to think. My main criteria for choosing would be availability of the songs I want to buy, not whether not the software is pretty.
If so, why is the G-Map turn-by-turn GPS app for iPhone OS 3.0 a roughly 800MB download? Their maps are locally stored. I see on their FAQ that they claim to be the first app with locally stored maps, so perhaps this ability (no need for WiFi) has not been well publicized yet. If the reviews I've read were a little better I'd probably already own a copy.
Also, to be fair, I'm not 100% sure it does the route guidance locally, but if it has the maps local, why wouldn't it?
Wish I could mod you up. This the point the GP misses. All the scenarios he mentions are niches, which probably will not see the GPS being replaced by smartphones in the near future. However, if companies like Garmin et. al. have to go back to catering only to those niche markets, there will be a lot of bleeding to be done. The standalone GPS might as well go extinct for the amount of shrinkage its market will see.
[sarcasm off] For the record, I believe 100% that the landings were real, but I also believe that nothing short of dragging the conspiracy nuts up to the moon themselves will convince them of the fact. Maybe not even that.
Interesting ideas. I always through the term "recycling" was misleading because usually it's impossible to make the -same- item again. Recycling a plastic bottle should mean making -other bottles-, not some puke-gray ergonomically horrific park bench (just how many of those does the world actually need?) Of course, entropy being what it is, I don't expect anybody to be able to make a perfect one-to-one conversion, but most 'recycling' efforts don't even try. Other examples: used tires being ground into playground mulch, newspapers being turned into paper towels. These approaches are a nice start, but still, the material is basically being 'down-cycled' and eventually reaches a level where it's going to end up as landfill anyway.
Where is Mr. Fusion when we need him!
I think I agree with you. My take, is that what you are describing is a 'real recovery', and a good thing. However, I am cynical enough to believe that many people in a position to influence the recovery have no desire to do that. They would rather try to pump blood from a stone until it's just impossible, and then they'll just leave the masses behind and move away (or gate themselves away). I don't think it's a done deal yet, but if the near future unfolded with the wealthy of America literally abandoning the country in a mass exodus, I wouldn't be surprised either.
Just consider the phrase you used: 'rearrangement of ability to spend'. I bet a lot people hear that and think Socialism. Never mind it might be in their long term best interest, if it means giving up something in the short term, they don't want anything to do with it.
Hear hear! Would mod you insightful but I'd rather comment this time. It's sad but true, that the 'recovery' we're looking for basically depends on the people who still have lots of money convincing the masses to go ahead and resume wasting theirs on things they really don't need at all. I'd almost rather see the recession continue indefinitely if it continues improving the saving rate of Americans or stops them from believing they need all the made-in-China crap that the marketing folks want them to buy.
I think you're also forgetting that HD-DVD was losing support from the US movie studios (a quick search shows Warner, Paramount and then Universal dropping HD-DVD in quick succession early last year - and somewhere in the middle of all that Toshiba announced they were ending production of HD-DVD products). I think by the time Toshiba gave in, their backs were against the wall and there really wasn't much else they could do. I'm not saying Sony didn't influence the defections, just that the 'payoff' isn't the whole story.
I agree with your comments almost 100%, especially in terms of movie prices. As I get older I discover the whole idea of owning movies is losing its luster. With all the choices we have these days for entertainment, it makes less and sense to buy movies you'll probably never watch again. I do make exceptions in a few cases: my kids and I find that almost all the Pixar movies have tons of replay value, so I don't mind buying them at full price (~$20) from time to time. I went out and bought the truly bizarre "Mr. Mike's Mondo Video" when it finally came out on DVD, because I was literally waiting decades for a chance to see it again.
That said, I've spent more money in the past few years buying used DVDs from the "buy two get one free" type bins at Gamestop, which basically makes the price closer to renting. (Sadly Gamestop has moved all their DVD inventory over to their separate Moviestop locations, and I don't find the deals there nearly as compelling.) I'm also a huge fan of Redbox which has finally provided a reasonably priced rental scheme and a truly convenient distribution system (I never understood why Blockbuster didn't use its size advantage to offer a 'rent anywhere return anywhere' system back when it had the chance).
My one disagreement with your comments is your holding out for PPC Mac support. Sorry, but that ship has sailed. A PPC Mac is no longer "perfectly good" the same way a 200 MHz Pentium PC is no longer "perfectly good" for much of anything. It's time to relegate your old MAC to web browsing and email and move on.
Answer the question Zero, tell Jonathan about the Corporate Wars.
*blub blub blub 13th Century blub blub*
If I wasn't commenting in this thread I'd mod you up. Especially in terms of local interest/events, newspapers drive a lot of reporting. What's the alternative? Local TV news departments don't have the same depth today as the papers do. In my own experience local cable news outlets are marginally better (Just because a channel like NECN is on all day doesn't mean it isn't just repeating largely the same news hour after hour). I can't confirm this right now, but I believe even national news outlets like CNN.COM pick up stories from the AP wire. Newspapers and the reporting infrastructure they've created are a valuable resource even if dead-tree news delivery is a relic of the last century.
Absolutely, and if the industry collapses we won't even have those one or two reporters to provide the raw material. The walled garden business model might resurrect the industry but it also might fail in a world where too many people now -expect- content to be free or at worst ad supported. I don't have any idea which way it's going to go. I only object to the notion that the socialized/democratized Web 2.0 world is ready to pick up the slack. Someday it may, but right now the expectations far outstrip the reality. I think the previous reply to my comment summarizes the situation in a very colorful manner.
Sorry but I strongly disagree. You might call mainstream journalism crap, and some of the writing along with the various media biases are certainly worthy of that term, but the mainstream media is still the place where we get the boots on the ground to actually find out what's happening in the world. Take that away and I don't know how much 'reporting' the blogosphere can actually support.
Everyday the local metropolitan newspaper (in my case the Boston Globe) provides coverage of dozens and dozens of events that you'd be hard pressed to learn about through an RSS reader watching some random collection of local blogs. And where do the local bloggers find out about these events themselves? I suspect a large percentage write about things they themselves learned from the mainstream media, and only a tiny fraction are writing about things they experienced in person.
Anyway, your last question is framing the issue incorrectly. People are turning away from newspapers in favor of -identical quality- sources which happen to be free, because those sources have been able to appropriate and parrot the same content with ease.
The telescope is at a much higher altitude and probably also in a different orbital inclination. The change in velocity (delta-V) needed to get it to the same position as the ISS, -and- moving at the same direction and speed, is enormous. The shuttle doesn't have that kind of fuel. Not sure if -any- rocket we've put into orbit has ever carried enough fuel for that job. (If anything it would have been the rockets that took the Apollo astronauts out of Earth orbit and sent them toward the moon).
I believe that an excellent movie could have been made about Kirk's early days in the Starfleet, meeting Spock and the others, forming long lasting friendships and loyalties, with plenty of action etc... without resorting to the completely implausible.
I agree. I would enjoy seeing such a movie. Unfortunately, I think the payoff is too slow for most people, especially when we're talking about theatrical release. It would be a good way to start a new TV series, but there's plenty of evidence that the TV networks are too impatient for a show like that to build an audience.
It's because Kirk is God!
No, seriously, who wants to watch blockbuster movies about the average Joe who has to slog through the ranks to make it to their rightful place in the grand scheme of things? That is 19/20th century "Horatio Hornblower" style writing. Kirk is a Superhero, who somehow ends up in command simply by force of personality and because it's his 'destiny' to do so.
Yes, it's completely implausible, but it's a valid form of story telling that isn't going to go away any time soon. People have liked "capitol-H" Heroes since the Greeks wrote stories about their gods.
Uh, multicasting might work great for live events, but how does it solve the video-on-demand problem? Are enough people looking to watch exactly the same pre-recorded video at exactly the same time for multicasting to really help?
The difference is that the "whining" that conservatives complained about was people wanting to be given something that was taken by force from someone else, whereas conservatives are "whining" about not being able to keep what actually belongs to them.
Well, I think it's not so clear cut what "actually belongs to them" considering all the shenanigans and manipulation of the legal system that people in power have been able to get away with over the last few decades. Robber barons may have had the law on their side at the time, but that doesn't necessarily make what they did morally correct. I personally believe that there are many cases where the rich have stolen from the masses, and perhaps it's time to get that money back where it belongs. Enron anyone? Why are taxes so high in the first place? I suspect it's often due to corrupt practices that take government money and hand it out like candy to well connected "whining conservatives".
you'd be more likely (if not all but forced) to visit the front pages of newspaper sites to get your news
Actually, I'm not very likely to do that. If it's not on CNN.COM, Time.com, Newsweek.com or other national/global sites, I'm just as likely to give up. I'm not going to start trolling through paper after paper (each one a walled garden of information) looking for content. I'm even less likely to pay a subscription fee to do so. In other words, I think the argument that 'if people can't use aggregators they'll come to us' is wishful thinking, when the third possibility is that the papers just drop off the radar entirely.
It doesn't help that the place where the papers should have the greatest strength, local news, has been a disappointment for me in the past. When something interesting happens today, I'd like to see it on the local newspaper web site -today-. Rarely happens. Newspapers seem to act as if stories don't need to be on the web until they're actually printed on dead trees first. If I'm lucky it will be posted tomorrow. If I'm not lucky it won't be posted at all since the public site has only a small subset of the newspaper's content. If it is posted eventually, I have the added aggravation of having to hunt it down quickly, because it's going to drop into the 'walled garden' in just a few days.
By the way, the papers might be including aggregators that provide nothing but links in their complaint, but I think their only hope is to focus on the ones like Google News that also provide 'fair use' snippets of the articles. Getting the snippets to stop might be the 'right' outcome anyway. I suspect that some papers -are- losing page views because people read the snippet and decide they've seen enough and don't need to click through. I'm pro fair use but I still want to see content creators survive and get paid.
The newspapers have no chance as far as I am concerned to convince a court that they should be paid just for linking. This is what I meant by 'the genie is out of the bottle'. So yes, I am saying that aggregation of some sort will be legal indefinitely. But I also believe, that if I'm wrong and the papers get their way, they've just killed themselves so much the faster, if my behavior is typical of the public at large.
Nobody is 'pulling me away' from any newspaper web sites. I never start there to begin with. Say I want to learn more about a current event, like Obama's visit to Baghdad (just an example). My first instinct is to look at a global news site like cnn.com. If I come up blank on my favorite sites, then I try Google News, which might lead me to the New York Times if the content is there. Even though the NYT, for instance, might be a decent source of global news, it will never be the first place I look, because it just -seems- so limited. Newspaper sites never seem to update fast enough for my tastes.
I -do- occasionally read stories from Boston.com (my local paper website). Why? Because I've placed their gadget on my iGoogle page. Before iGoogle I hardly ever went there.
These days CNN is also acting as an aggregator of sorts, as many articles linked on its home page are actually news stories from local TV networks. Is anybody in TV-land complaining that cnn.com is stealing local station website eyeballs?
I don't see myself ever paying for digital delivery of a specific newspaper. Why limit myself to one view (and pay for it to boot) when the whole world is available out there with or without Google? Nobody's going to put that genie back in the bottle.
The newspapers need Google to lead eyeballs to their sites. They're just so desperate they expect to be paid on top of that. Schmidt has called their bluff by pointing out that they can opt out at any time.
This is the core of the matter. How many times does somebody say/think "This news was reported by a blogger", when what really happened was "This blogger wrote an entry online after reading a professional report somebody else was paid to create"? I seriously doubt that bloggers act as 'primary sources' of news reporting (meaning they are actually THERE, watching what's happening and writing original copy), more than 1% of the time, except for outlying events like technology conferences. For local news, like the three car accident that tied up I-95 for 6 hours last night, I'd suggest your chances of learning about that from a blog are very close to zero.
A balance needs to be struck somewhere. Content IS valuable. The 'fair use' crowd might be correct in this particular case, but what kind of victory is gained if we lose the content anyway?