PayPal's alright, but if you had to make those donations five times a day at different sites you'd get pretty bloody sick of it.
Convenience is key. The ideal is for micropayments to require only:
A simple registration process to sign up, and
One simple click to transfer money every time the user views new content
Anything more cumbersome, and not many people will go to the trouble. It's not that they're selfish with their money; they're selfish with their time. (And why wouldn't they be? You can always make more money, but you can never buy more time.)
It's true that the "Everything should be Free" (as in beer, not in speech) attitude is quite pervasive now, and will probably linger for a while. I don't think it'll be permanent, though. Give it a few more years of ad-supported content companies going bankrupt, and the vanishing of all the ad-supported ISPs, and people will realize that producing content is work, just like anything else.
I think we just went through this really odd historical phase, where so many people believed that eyeballs for advertising were extremely valuable. It seems like an odd clash of the old advertising mindset of stuffing consumer ideas down your throat, and the new (Internet-enabled) mindset of picking and choosing only the experiences you want. I'm glad we're winning, but the minefields aren't all cleared out yet.
With micropayments, everybody who views the content is expected to pay a little bit. Nobody gets a free ride, but there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be set in place for this to work.
With the SPP, the creator simply waits to receive the pre-ordained payment amount, and then releases the work into the public domain. The creator receives no more money for that piece than the original payment amount. You could conceivably have situations where one person pays an artist $10,000 to release content online, and then 10,000 users download it for free.
There are lots of pros and cons for both. Personally, I don't care too much which one becomes the predominant one, as long as one of them arrives soon enough to put the top-heavy music & publishing industries out of business.
However, micropayments require a lot of infrastructure to be built, which means you need a well-controlled, easily-metered distributive system. This is why you hear about micropayments a lot for writing and online comics -- those are spread through the web -- but almost not at all for MP3s. The ways that people get MP3s are far too varied -- FTP, Napster, web, e-mail -- to imagine slapping a micropayment onto them.
How can somebody write an article about the MacOS and not at all mention ease of use? That's the number one concrete selling point of the OS (as opposed to the marketing selling point, which is look & feel, a related but separate point.) This article just seemed so typical of the tunnel-vision that some open-source folks get. Tobin writes that since LinuxPPC et. al are open-source, "anybody can tinker and edit the entire system to their heart's content." Those words are positive to an experienced hacker, but to the average letter-writing & game-playing user, those words translate to "You will waste your entire weekend typing in commands you don't understand, just to get your video card to work."
But for what it's worth, I think the MacOS's lead in usability has shrunk drastically in the last couple of years -- Steve Jobs seems far more interested in marketing flash than actually aiding the user these days. I haven't used the OSX betas, but I don't have high hopes for them. That might be a reason for me to switch to Linux at some point. Usability is far more important to me that serious stability & scalability: Not every user wants to host a server in their home.
There are a lot of people who'd be willing to pay $5/month to use Napster, at first. The problem is that to justify that cost, Napster will need to continually innovate to stay ahead of the free, open-source competition, and they seem to incapable of doing so. Of course, the idea of Napster itself is world-changingly innovative, but what have they done to maintain the software since then? All I've seen them add in the past year is the ability to exclude search terms with the minus sign. For God's sake, the bloody Napster icon is still messed up on my WinNT client.
On the other hand, go over to SourceForge and do a search for Napster to see how many people are trying to build on the idea. It's only a matter of time before:
Napster gets fat and complacent on its subscription fees, and lets its quality of service fall to shit
Some hacker adds some great new feature to some part of the system, and tells eir friends about it
Napster is blissfully ignorant of the feature, or just ignores the feature, hoping it will never catch on
The feature catches on, tons of people switch over to the open-source alternative
The easy revenue stream for musicians disappears again.
So a fee from Napster won't solve it. Once again, I feel obliged to point to the Street Performer Protocol as a way around this: It offers a way for artists to be paid for their work, without forcing any arbitrary controls on the methods of distribution.
Of course, we do all realize that eventhough IE4 and NN4 are 90+ percent compatible, companies and designers still choose to DETECT THE BROWSER AND CREATE DIFFERENT VERSIONS.
This is happening a lot less often. I've worked at two different interactive agencies, and my experience has been that many agencies these days prefer to avoid the work of browser detection if they can. If they're using ornate Javascript, then they'll do it if they have to, but otherwise, they consider it labor wasted because it could've been spent on better design or a more robust backend.
The commercial web has been hurt by its own poor user experience. There has been little to no improvement in the user experience of commercial web sites. Things like customer service, order fulfillment, information architecture, usability, and privacy have generally not improved at all in the last five years -- and they were pretty shitty to begin with. It's the year 2000, and I still see well-funded dotcoms with unusable navigation and time-wasting splash pages. It's the year 2000, and I still get spam from most of the companies I've ordered a product from.
I was more optimistic at first, telling myself that eventually companies would realize the importance of user experience, but I'm starting to think that there's a poisoning of the waters going on. There are a lot of surveys that indicate that web users have an extremely low trust of web sites in general. And it might be very difficult for one individual web site to change that tide. A possible short-term trend, then, might involve a massive die-off of commercial web sites, followed by a period where new entrants will have to work ten times as hard on user experience, just to get over user suspicion.
The commercial web is not the web. Of course, if you look at the web in non-commercial terms, it's pretty successful. Personally, I find it remarkable that I can get a quick answer to most any narrowly defined question in a matter of minutes: I go to google, type in something like "sake temperature FAQ", and get almost instantly pointed to the quick answer I need. Maybe that's not the buy-everything-online future predicted in the tech-business press. But maybe life isn't just about buying shit.
The web is not the internet. Look at the most recent groundbreaking consumer technology: Napster spawned thousands of users (and hundreds of Slashdot stories) by writing an entirely new protocol that has nothing to do with the web. You could make the case that innovation on the web will slow down now, since there's less new ground to cover. But there's still a lot of ground to be covered by writing entirely new protocols for applications that the Web was simply never intended to support.
If you wanted to, you could even make the point that the web and e-mail were killer apps for the internet as a whole. If you'd created Napster five years ago, its impact would've been marginal. But because everybody had been hooked into the network because of all these grand predictions of an web-based future, Napster had a much bigger user base to start from.
I don't agree with this action, but I can see why Apple did it. It's no secret that ever since Steve Jobs took back the reigns of Apple, marketing has taken priority over usability (and speed, and stability). For example, look at the original iMac, which won an avalanche of rave reviews among product designers, but came out with a completely unusable keyboard and mouse.
OS X is a good example of this problem: A lot of flashy stuff designed to demo well, very little attention paid to actual usability. To quote Bruce Tognazzini: "The purpose of the icons, the purpose of the entire OS X look and feel, is to keep the customer happy during that critical period between the time of sale and the time the check clears."
It puts Apple in a situation of being overly dependent on look-and-feel, so they feel they have to go after themes.org. They're probably nervous that if people see you can get those pretty pictures on another OS, they'll start wondering what exactly it is that makes a Mac a Mac. Of course, true innovation in OS design is more than a matter of hiring a few great graphic designers. But then, Apple hasn't been an innovative company for quite some time.
If I understand it correctly, you should be able to simply find another provider who is not on the RBL, switch over, and change the DNS settings for the domain name. A hassle, sure, but not the permanent clusterfuck you portray it as. (And I'm quite confused as to why crossalizer.de moved to crossalizer.com, too.)
I work at a web shop, and when we make hosting decisions, we've had to make the decision to switch away from an ISP that's on the RBL. Sure, it's a little extra work, but I guess I'm happier that I know that the ISP is harboring spammers, and that they're losing our company's business as a result.
I agree with most of what your saying, but allow me to take issue with the idea of logical proofs in software. Not that I've done it much, but there are a few reasons I'd rather not rely on this:
The vast majority of software is a question of implementation, not algorithmic logic. It seems like it's a lot more complicated to prove implementation than algorithms.
There are currently a very small number of people with both the analytical skills and the severely rational temperment required to do these proofs. So relying on that for QA seems like it would put a really nasty bottleneck on the process.
I have this sneaking suspicion that any abstraction of code -- UML, flowcharts, proofs -- is only that: an abstraction. And that correctness (or, more likely, bugginess) lives in the code, and in the code alone, so that's where you have to weed it out.
It just seems like it'd be no fun. Don't get me wrong; I try to make my code clean and maintainable and all that. But if I had to run it all through some tortuous logic to prove to myself that it works, I don't think I'd ever want to code at all.
I personally think Extreme Programming holds a high amount of promise. At times it seems like dogma, but in general its principles make a lot of sense to me. Keep those feedback loops tight. Fixed requirements are a myth, so don't ever design for fixed requirements. Well-maintained test cases are as important as coding.
(Of course, I work in a web shop, and the definition of QA in our industry is "Those colors look right in that Photoshop mockup", so it's not like I really know from experience. Just some random thoughts.)
One of Lanier's points is that he thinks software should be fragmented in practice, since it's currently used in so many ways. To quote:
The software that runs your pacemaker is not even considered for a moment to be the same sort of entity as the software that you use to write music.... If your interpretation of software is that it's like a bridge [and] people need to know what they're driving on, then yes, a little peer review could help. If you think of software as literature, if you're somebody like Ted Nelson, say, then what you really want is groups of people who are emboldened to try wild things.
I have a lot of respect for Lanier, and I particularly thought One Half a Manifesto was a useful and badly needed bit of skepticism against what he terms "cybernetic totalism". But I think he's off on this point.
To be sure, different parts of software have different needs. If you're designed space shuttle guidance software, go ahead and engineer for five nines (99.999% uptime). A script that pages you when you get an e-mail from your girlfriend is probably a lot less mission-critical.
But there are certain questions that are useful to the software engineering process, regardless of what code you're writing. To think of a few, off the top of my head:
Who are the users? What are their needs?
How quickly are the needs likely to change in the future?
How long should the software stay out of obsolescence?
How reliable should the software be?
How can you decrease the amount of repetitive work that humans have to do?
Every successful software project needs to ask these questions, preferably sooner than later. Fragmenting software engineering would have a very poor effect on the development of these base strategies, so hopefully it'll never happen.
The internet buzzword that applies here is "disintermediation" -- that is, the way that new networks cut out the middleman and their part of the cut. It's been happening across many sectors of business due to the internet; I remember hearing, for example, of moderate cuts in the salesforces of midline department store chains because a lot of people were using ecommerce sites instead.
The only significant difference in this case is that, unlike department stores, the RIAA has some legal leverage to use to protect its own middleman status. Even so, I wonder how long they'll be able to last.
I wonder if it'd be useful for some sort of a standards body to set a distro standard. Kind of like ANSI C (only you could probably get by with a more expedient process than they use for ANSI stuff). Just a broad-based effort to say "You can stick whatever you want into your own Linux, but you can't call it Linux Standard (or whatever) unless it meets all these conditions."
Assuming the process had the right mix of being 1) open to most voices in the community and 2) fast enough to incorporate new innovations into the standard core, it might be helpful to prevent fragmentation.
If/When I ever get around to buying a Palm, I'm seriously going to consider getting FITALY software for it. FITALY -- which was mentioned here once, I believe -- is a keyboard layout designed for one-finger typing. It's laid out based on what letters you'll most commonly need, by analyzing the English language. The most commonly typed six letters are in the center, for example, and much of the time, the next letter you need to type is right next to the one you just typed. Seems like a very viable solution to me. No voice-control to make you sound like lunatic on the subway, no chording to make you feel like a Borg.
Does anybody have any hard numbers as to exactly who's getting laid off in various downturns? I ask because I'm a web programmer / DB designer who's working in NYC (Silicon Alley, if you wanna use that term). And I haven't noticed job prospects for me or any of my programmer acquaintances getting any worse.
Which makes me wonder if the market shrinkage is mostly affecting those with "soft" skills, i.e., marketing, project management, etc., etc.
Actually, the U.S.'s predominance in the computer field is in large part due to government assistance. For one thing, the U.S. armed forces has been one of the most significant organizations in terms of investing in technology research -- remember that ENIAC was originally designed to help the Defense Dept. calculate mortar trajectory tables for World War II.
And the Internet itself was originally built on a number of networks created and maintained by either the military, or publically funded academic & research organizations. Remember Compuserve? Remember the days of the pre-internet AOL? That's all the network that the private sector could create on its own. The public sector invested in the networks first, and after they did the hard work, private companies jumped in to fill the void in the commercial market.
Without public investment, we'd all have shitty e-mail addresses like 95820.4829@compuserve.com. If we had e-mail at all.
While engineers and other techies (i.e. the bulk of Slashdot's readership) are at risk for RSI, they also have enough clout in the marketplace to ask for, and get, decent equipment to work on. The people who are genuinely at risk are those who do highly repetitive, low-paying computer- and machine-based work such as data entry, shipping, stocking, etc., etc.. They're engaged in activities that put them at extremely high risk for RSI -- more so, I'd wager, than many techies, since engineering work has many breaks where you take your hands off the keyboard and stop to think. And let's not forget that the people in those kinds of low-skills jobs have almost no clout in the marketplace, and cannot demand ergonomically okay equipment.
So before all the anti-regulation complaints start, please stop and think about it from the point of view of someone who's working one of those jobs. Not only are you doing a menial task for low money and little chance for advancement (much less human engagement), without OSHA you'd face the possibility of losing the use of your hands sometime in the next few years. You'd probably be grateful for the government intervention, too.
If you put the phone on vibrate, so that you don't disturb anyone, such as in a business meeting or movie theatre, the phone will vibrate when you get a call, but then will RING to let you know you have missed a call.
Personally, I just turn my cell off (I have a StarTac, too) when I'm in a meeting, or at the movies, and then I turn it on when I'm done. I figure if I'm not even going to answer the call, or pop open the phone to see who it's from, I don't even need to know that I am getting a call, or at least not at that moment.
I know that MacOS is a bitch to write applications for, but still it's a shame there's no MacOS port. There are many web development/design shops that use Macs at a number of points in their development process. Of course, any self-respecting web company would have both Macs and PCs around for testing, but you tend to use a tool much less frequently if you have to switch to another computer to do it.
True, the media business is enourmous and pumps out a lot of sterile crap. However, just because lots of people are willing to pay for commoditised snippets of information, and lots of companies will provide that information, the market for quality journalism is no smaller. You just have to know where to look.
Niches exist, but they're far more prevalent in markets where the audience has a lot of money. ("Why The Free Market is Not a Democracy," point 1.) Look at the tremendous number of phonebook-sized New Economy magazines -- Business 2.0, Wired, Industry Standard, etc., etc. Then look at the flimsy page count and non-glossy paper of a little lefty magazine like The Nation -- that's not just a circulation question. It's also a question of who the readership is and how much disposable income they have. DeBeers isn't knocking down The Nation's doors to buy ads for diamonds in the next issue.
There's a lot of valuable content that has nothing to do with mindlessly buying shit. Which is the fundamental flaw with ad-supported journalism.
Actually, any place that has public performances of recorded music is supposed to pay songwriting royalties, usually through ASCAP or BMI. (And although this seems like more egregious corporate shakedown, let's note that the vast majority of these royalties go directly to bonafide flesh-and-blood songwriters, and not the record companies.) On the level of bars & restaurants, royalty payments seem to be irregular at best -- many bars have never been asked to pay. But some bars have had visits from reps from ASCAP or BMI, asking them to pay their royalty fee, yes.
At the risk of sounding like a Marxist, let me point this out: Property is not a concept that we find in nature, and it's not an idea handed to us by God. It is an arbitrary social construct, a scheme of points and benefits that we set up so that all of society can benefit.
For example, most tribal societies didn't believe in the idea of owning land. Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of somebody else owning the tools that they didn't use personally was also a bit counterintuitive. Eventually, people in society decided it might be beneficial to let those property rights exist, and they put them into place.
What does that have to do with copyright? Simple: Copyright is a system that we as a society set up to balance conflicting interests -- for the good of society as a whole. And if the circumstances change, we can change them, too. We should: I'm a firm believer that art, like software engineering, is extremely hard work, and that people should be compensated for it. (I studied both in college, and thought art was ten times asdifficult.) But I also believe that hamstringing new technologies just for the sake of preserving an outmoded system of compensation would only serve the best interests of corporate attorneys.
Ergo fanatics should check out the chair designed by HumanScale. Not that I can afford the thing, but it seems pretty cool: It automatically adjusts to find you an optimal posture, but it does so with electronics or sensors. It does so with cantilevers, balances, and sliders that adjust to your own movement. Sometimes the most elegant solution has nothing to do with computers...
My favorite alternate system is Instant Runoff Voting. How it works is simple: Everybody votes for the candidates they like, in order. They tally up everybody's first choice, but if no candidate has a majority, they knock off the candidate with the smallest vote (those people's votes go to their second choice), and count again. Repeat until somebody has a majority.
For example: I'm a serious lefty, so the idea of voting for Gore kind of makes me wretch. Let's say I arrange my votes like:
Ralph Nader
Al Gore
George Dubya Bush
Satan
Pat Buchanan
Ralph won't get a majority, so my vote will probably end up going to Al Gore, who might be able to win. But I still can vote my conscience, and make a statement nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
Convenience is key. The ideal is for micropayments to require only:
- A simple registration process to sign up, and
- One simple click to transfer money every time the user views new content
Anything more cumbersome, and not many people will go to the trouble. It's not that they're selfish with their money; they're selfish with their time. (And why wouldn't they be? You can always make more money, but you can never buy more time.)I think we just went through this really odd historical phase, where so many people believed that eyeballs for advertising were extremely valuable. It seems like an odd clash of the old advertising mindset of stuffing consumer ideas down your throat, and the new (Internet-enabled) mindset of picking and choosing only the experiences you want. I'm glad we're winning, but the minefields aren't all cleared out yet.
- With micropayments, everybody who views the content is expected to pay a little bit. Nobody gets a free ride, but there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be set in place for this to work.
- With the SPP, the creator simply waits to receive the pre-ordained payment amount, and then releases the work into the public domain. The creator receives no more money for that piece than the original payment amount. You could conceivably have situations where one person pays an artist $10,000 to release content online, and then 10,000 users download it for free.
There are lots of pros and cons for both. Personally, I don't care too much which one becomes the predominant one, as long as one of them arrives soon enough to put the top-heavy music & publishing industries out of business.However, micropayments require a lot of infrastructure to be built, which means you need a well-controlled, easily-metered distributive system. This is why you hear about micropayments a lot for writing and online comics -- those are spread through the web -- but almost not at all for MP3s. The ways that people get MP3s are far too varied -- FTP, Napster, web, e-mail -- to imagine slapping a micropayment onto them.
But for what it's worth, I think the MacOS's lead in usability has shrunk drastically in the last couple of years -- Steve Jobs seems far more interested in marketing flash than actually aiding the user these days. I haven't used the OSX betas, but I don't have high hopes for them. That might be a reason for me to switch to Linux at some point. Usability is far more important to me that serious stability & scalability: Not every user wants to host a server in their home.
On the other hand, go over to SourceForge and do a search for Napster to see how many people are trying to build on the idea. It's only a matter of time before:
- Napster gets fat and complacent on its subscription fees, and lets its quality of service fall to shit
- Some hacker adds some great new feature to some part of the system, and tells eir friends about it
- Napster is blissfully ignorant of the feature, or just ignores the feature, hoping it will never catch on
- The feature catches on, tons of people switch over to the open-source alternative
- The easy revenue stream for musicians disappears again.
So a fee from Napster won't solve it. Once again, I feel obliged to point to the Street Performer Protocol as a way around this: It offers a way for artists to be paid for their work, without forcing any arbitrary controls on the methods of distribution.Getting to the stories through channel.nytimes.com allows you to see the stories without registering. Here's that Iridium story.
There has been little to no improvement in the user experience of commercial web sites. Things like customer service, order fulfillment, information architecture, usability, and privacy have generally not improved at all in the last five years -- and they were pretty shitty to begin with. It's the year 2000, and I still see well-funded dotcoms with unusable navigation and time-wasting splash pages. It's the year 2000, and I still get spam from most of the companies I've ordered a product from.
I was more optimistic at first, telling myself that eventually companies would realize the importance of user experience, but I'm starting to think that there's a poisoning of the waters going on. There are a lot of surveys that indicate that web users have an extremely low trust of web sites in general. And it might be very difficult for one individual web site to change that tide. A possible short-term trend, then, might involve a massive die-off of commercial web sites, followed by a period where new entrants will have to work ten times as hard on user experience, just to get over user suspicion.
Of course, if you look at the web in non-commercial terms, it's pretty successful. Personally, I find it remarkable that I can get a quick answer to most any narrowly defined question in a matter of minutes: I go to google, type in something like "sake temperature FAQ", and get almost instantly pointed to the quick answer I need. Maybe that's not the buy-everything-online future predicted in the tech-business press. But maybe life isn't just about buying shit.
Look at the most recent groundbreaking consumer technology: Napster spawned thousands of users (and hundreds of Slashdot stories) by writing an entirely new protocol that has nothing to do with the web. You could make the case that innovation on the web will slow down now, since there's less new ground to cover. But there's still a lot of ground to be covered by writing entirely new protocols for applications that the Web was simply never intended to support.
If you wanted to, you could even make the point that the web and e-mail were killer apps for the internet as a whole. If you'd created Napster five years ago, its impact would've been marginal. But because everybody had been hooked into the network because of all these grand predictions of an web-based future, Napster had a much bigger user base to start from.
OS X is a good example of this problem: A lot of flashy stuff designed to demo well, very little attention paid to actual usability. To quote Bruce Tognazzini: "The purpose of the icons, the purpose of the entire OS X look and feel, is to keep the customer happy during that critical period between the time of sale and the time the check clears."
It puts Apple in a situation of being overly dependent on look-and-feel, so they feel they have to go after themes.org. They're probably nervous that if people see you can get those pretty pictures on another OS, they'll start wondering what exactly it is that makes a Mac a Mac. Of course, true innovation in OS design is more than a matter of hiring a few great graphic designers. But then, Apple hasn't been an innovative company for quite some time.
I work at a web shop, and when we make hosting decisions, we've had to make the decision to switch away from an ISP that's on the RBL. Sure, it's a little extra work, but I guess I'm happier that I know that the ISP is harboring spammers, and that they're losing our company's business as a result.
I personally think Extreme Programming holds a high amount of promise. At times it seems like dogma, but in general its principles make a lot of sense to me. Keep those feedback loops tight. Fixed requirements are a myth, so don't ever design for fixed requirements. Well-maintained test cases are as important as coding.
(Of course, I work in a web shop, and the definition of QA in our industry is "Those colors look right in that Photoshop mockup", so it's not like I really know from experience. Just some random thoughts.)
The software that runs your pacemaker is not even considered for a moment to be the same sort of entity as the software that you use to write music. ... If your interpretation of software is that it's like a bridge [and] people need to know what they're driving on, then yes, a little peer review could help. If you think of software as literature, if you're somebody like Ted Nelson, say, then what you really want is groups of people who are emboldened to try wild things.
I have a lot of respect for Lanier, and I particularly thought One Half a Manifesto was a useful and badly needed bit of skepticism against what he terms "cybernetic totalism". But I think he's off on this point.
To be sure, different parts of software have different needs. If you're designed space shuttle guidance software, go ahead and engineer for five nines (99.999% uptime). A script that pages you when you get an e-mail from your girlfriend is probably a lot less mission-critical.
But there are certain questions that are useful to the software engineering process, regardless of what code you're writing. To think of a few, off the top of my head:
Every successful software project needs to ask these questions, preferably sooner than later. Fragmenting software engineering would have a very poor effect on the development of these base strategies, so hopefully it'll never happen.
The only significant difference in this case is that, unlike department stores, the RIAA has some legal leverage to use to protect its own middleman status. Even so, I wonder how long they'll be able to last.
Assuming the process had the right mix of being 1) open to most voices in the community and 2) fast enough to incorporate new innovations into the standard core, it might be helpful to prevent fragmentation.
If/When I ever get around to buying a Palm, I'm seriously going to consider getting FITALY software for it. FITALY -- which was mentioned here once, I believe -- is a keyboard layout designed for one-finger typing. It's laid out based on what letters you'll most commonly need, by analyzing the English language. The most commonly typed six letters are in the center, for example, and much of the time, the next letter you need to type is right next to the one you just typed. Seems like a very viable solution to me. No voice-control to make you sound like lunatic on the subway, no chording to make you feel like a Borg.
Which makes me wonder if the market shrinkage is mostly affecting those with "soft" skills, i.e., marketing, project management, etc., etc.
And the Internet itself was originally built on a number of networks created and maintained by either the military, or publically funded academic & research organizations. Remember Compuserve? Remember the days of the pre-internet AOL? That's all the network that the private sector could create on its own. The public sector invested in the networks first, and after they did the hard work, private companies jumped in to fill the void in the commercial market.
Without public investment, we'd all have shitty e-mail addresses like 95820.4829@compuserve.com. If we had e-mail at all.
So before all the anti-regulation complaints start, please stop and think about it from the point of view of someone who's working one of those jobs. Not only are you doing a menial task for low money and little chance for advancement (much less human engagement), without OSHA you'd face the possibility of losing the use of your hands sometime in the next few years. You'd probably be grateful for the government intervention, too.
Personally, I just turn my cell off (I have a StarTac, too) when I'm in a meeting, or at the movies, and then I turn it on when I'm done. I figure if I'm not even going to answer the call, or pop open the phone to see who it's from, I don't even need to know that I am getting a call, or at least not at that moment.
I know that MacOS is a bitch to write applications for, but still it's a shame there's no MacOS port. There are many web development/design shops that use Macs at a number of points in their development process. Of course, any self-respecting web company would have both Macs and PCs around for testing, but you tend to use a tool much less frequently if you have to switch to another computer to do it.
Niches exist, but they're far more prevalent in markets where the audience has a lot of money. ("Why The Free Market is Not a Democracy," point 1.) Look at the tremendous number of phonebook-sized New Economy magazines -- Business 2.0, Wired, Industry Standard, etc., etc. Then look at the flimsy page count and non-glossy paper of a little lefty magazine like The Nation -- that's not just a circulation question. It's also a question of who the readership is and how much disposable income they have. DeBeers isn't knocking down The Nation's doors to buy ads for diamonds in the next issue.
There's a lot of valuable content that has nothing to do with mindlessly buying shit. Which is the fundamental flaw with ad-supported journalism.
Actually, any place that has public performances of recorded music is supposed to pay songwriting royalties, usually through ASCAP or BMI. (And although this seems like more egregious corporate shakedown, let's note that the vast majority of these royalties go directly to bonafide flesh-and-blood songwriters, and not the record companies.) On the level of bars & restaurants, royalty payments seem to be irregular at best -- many bars have never been asked to pay. But some bars have had visits from reps from ASCAP or BMI, asking them to pay their royalty fee, yes.
For example, most tribal societies didn't believe in the idea of owning land. Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of somebody else owning the tools that they didn't use personally was also a bit counterintuitive. Eventually, people in society decided it might be beneficial to let those property rights exist, and they put them into place.
What does that have to do with copyright? Simple: Copyright is a system that we as a society set up to balance conflicting interests -- for the good of society as a whole. And if the circumstances change, we can change them, too. We should: I'm a firm believer that art, like software engineering, is extremely hard work, and that people should be compensated for it. (I studied both in college, and thought art was ten times asdifficult.) But I also believe that hamstringing new technologies just for the sake of preserving an outmoded system of compensation would only serve the best interests of corporate attorneys.
Ergo fanatics should check out the chair designed by HumanScale. Not that I can afford the thing, but it seems pretty cool: It automatically adjusts to find you an optimal posture, but it does so with electronics or sensors. It does so with cantilevers, balances, and sliders that adjust to your own movement. Sometimes the most elegant solution has nothing to do with computers ...
For example: I'm a serious lefty, so the idea of voting for Gore kind of makes me wretch. Let's say I arrange my votes like:
- Ralph Nader
- Al Gore
- George Dubya Bush
- Satan
- Pat Buchanan
Ralph won't get a majority, so my vote will probably end up going to Al Gore, who might be able to win. But I still can vote my conscience, and make a statement nonetheless.