I believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, that my fianc
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Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition. As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can’t watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse. Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar. Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare: “I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to…
Predictions for 2005: 1. Wikiyahoo – Tagging/Folksonomies become the tech talk of the town. Flickr gets acquired 2. Googlets – People cash out and leave Google, creating a startup frenzy in SF 3. An Englishman
Ooh I like this, about time fact checking got a reality check. Jason Kottke satirizes anal retentive blogger fact checking of big media, pointing out that almost anything can be deconstructed to look misleading. 60 Minutes wrong again! (kottke.org)
The Internet allows you to protest directly against unethical advertisers by clicking on ads you don’t like. Traditionally people have protested against hate media such as Michael Savage’s radio show by encouraging people to boycott advertisers on the show. The problem is this is indirect. Without direct penalties, shows like Savage’s actually rely on the ‘all publicity is good publicity’ phenomenon of having large audiences of people who listen just to be outraged. Advertisers gravitate towards low end brands where negative feelings against them are outweighed by the fact that some percentage of overall listeners will convert to buyers. It occurred to me that the Internet allows you to do something much more direct, to penalize advertisers by clicking on text ads and not buying anything. This doesn’t just lower revenues it actually costs the advertiser directly. The ‘all publicity is good publicity’ goes away. One could go one step…
I am currently mulling over the sheer generosity and heartfelt sentiment from the goose-stepping Ayn Rand Institute: U.S. Should Not Help Tsunami Victims The argument being that all money should come from individual donations. Only there is no donation box for Tsunami victims on the Rand website. Tsunami victims are presumably from ‘primitive nations’ where ‘the mere fact that they needed help should not have created a claim ‘as simultaneously Isolationist and Jingoist Ed Locke says of Vietnam, in another classic muddle headed Rand Institute Op Ed. By extension, should all Iraq rebuilding money come from donations from those who were in favor of invasion? Should the invasion itself have been funded from donations? It’s a nice thought, perhaps the Iraq war would have never happened if people had to put their money where their mouth is. But democracy ain’t like that, you can’t hold a referendum for everything. Society…
My recent experiences with realtors show me that: most of them don’t know very much about buildings; waste your time by lying in descriptions; seem to be the last people on earth to use email and digital cameras instead of time wasting phone calls and expensive on-site visits. Realtors charge up to a quarter of what architects do, without most of the skill, service or liability. The reason that this happens is that they own the customer. By extension, if their services don’t benefit customers then this will change. Why hasn’t the Internet destroyed the current hopeless realtor merry-go-round. Perhaps a listings service could be built where data can only be submitted if: 1. the realtor or seller lists a contact email(rather than them contact you, or by phone). 2. all listing have digital pictures of outside and all rooms. 3. all room sizes are listed in square foot. 4….
It sounds like a very magnanimous thing for Google to do – to build a virtual library of Alexandria, but there is a solid business reason as well. One of the simplest ways to game Google is to scan out of copyright books, rare ones ideally, boost Pagerank by buying hard links, and serve Adsense against the results. This is commonly done currently, with specialist Dictionaries. However, Pagerank only really works if you have original content, i.e. stuff that is not already on the web; slapping up a copy of the works of Shakespeare won’t do. If Google scans out of copyright books, and serves them up itself, then attempts to trick Google into handing out Adsense revenue without generating any content will not work. Google adds major libraries to its database
David Berlind has done his homework in What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it. The first sensible piece about RSS all year. The reality of RSS is that modules have been a failure, and that leaves RSS as a standard for headlines and links and a miscellaneous catch all called description or content. As Berlind points out you dont always have headlines and links are sometimes ambiguous, so that leaves us looking at a rather naked emperor. But that doesn’t mean to say that RSS isn’t useful as a meme if not a standard.
BBC – BBC Four Documentaries – Jonathan Miller’s Brief History of Disbelief “In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller leads viewers on a personal journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.” via Blackbeltjones’ delicious
I am going to be using this blog to collect notes for a book, so postings may sometimes seem a bit random. The book will be about faith – a defense of atheism and an attack on ideology and blind faith, from religion to secular political doctrine and cults. This comes at a time when the US has suffered terribly from attacks justified entirely by faith, while at the same time becoming more religious than any other developed nation. The book will not beat about the bush, I aim to put forward the argument that faith is necessarily bad, something to be tolerated where it is itself tolerant but not to be respected. The aim is still to write something positive, something that contains not just an argument for science over superstition, but also argues for a richer culture based upon appreciating art without having to literally believe it.
“after months of research, experts believe they may now hold the key to the 250-year-old code, which is carved on a monument at the Earl of Lichfield’s Shugborough Hall estate in Staffordshire. The Shepherd’s Monument, commissioned in 1748 by the then earl, Thomas Anson, features a carved image of a Nicolas Poussin painting with the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. underneath. The cryptic inscription was rumoured to point to the location of the Holy Grail – the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper.” Two things: 1. Any code this short is difficult to crack without resorting to other clues in the context. 2. There is a huge incentive to subconsciously or consciously accept the context of the connections to the Holy Grail, particularly at a time when the Da Vinci Code book is generating a boatload of cash around Holy Grail seeker tourist sites. Perhaps D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. means: DaVinci…