4 posts tagged “media”
I'll admit (before papabean comes in here to argue the merits) that copyright is a complicated issue and if i were at the helm of any old-model business based on maintaining a dominant share of content ownership being forced to acclimate rapidly to a constantly changing technological environment which i neither appeared to understand nor have any appreciation for, I'd probably be a little terrified and prone to bad, unnerved decision making. And I have neither the knowledge nor the passion nor likely the money to ever have been a Lik-Sang customer. I don't think I would ever make the decision Sony has, and fire me the day I do. (via)
Thanks, Sony. I hope you lose a shitload of money on Blu-Ray.
Christ, it's hilarious to see Sony wringing its hands over its poor customers! These are the people who compromised 500,000 computer networks with their rootkits and spyware!
ever hear people complain that media corporations are consolidating, and gaining strength, and that some of them are so powerful that they influence governments and policies and even what you think of what's going on in the world, because they have a lot of control over what you see and hear and experience? these fucking maniacs ramble on about how there are three companies in control of us all. dumbasses! there are six.
so busy as of late that i haven't kept up with posting or reading. i am swamped, officially, although it is paying off.
New York Magazine presents: What if 9/11 never happened? Not in the conspiracy sense, but in the history can go a million different ways sense. [via]
The US ranks among the lowest in the world in acceptance of evolution. Next you'll tell me that dinosaurs were real.
Fifteen of the most important websites of ALL TIME! I could quibble with some of this (like the implication that napster's current 500,000 paying subscribers have anything to do with its all-time relevance, or friendsreunited, which can't be that important since i've never heard of it), but it's a pretty solid list of the pretty solidly obvious. But man oh man, they're missing a huge one. If they only knew. [via]
Having worked in customer service (over email and a one-time phone call that ended with the other guy saying, "this game is the only fun i have in my life. please fix it"), I can sympathize with these guys. But I've also been the caller, haven't we all. [a different via]
no chance i can effectively comment on things like this right now, but i think about them. I need jobs that revolve around thinking through things like this. I've got one this summer but it's over in a week. [via]
i've always trusted the us news & world report college rankings, but i've read a couple of arguments against it lately - mostly here. similar to the above article about gaming digg, you can game the usn&wp as well. the washington monthly rankings take a different approach to college rankings. personal anecdote: i didn't take a friday class my junior or senior year of college. i later learned that the school had only in the last ten to fifteen years begun to have friday classes, as their existence - wait for it - factored into the algorithm.
this is sorta funny; i'm only linking to it cause a lot of people are ending up in new york these days.
a wifi router that includes 160 gig drive, itunes, bittorrent & ftp. i very rarely use bittorrents, but it strikes me as a huge leap forward. i see down the path to totally on-demand cable, where content comes from all over instead of through huge traffic, and you'll buy youtube videos for a penny (or a cool grand, following hyperinflation), sopranos episodes for 1 to watch or 3 to save, movies on similar prices, and you can manage what you want to pull down from the web from your pocket or laptop. hell, price could go up or down depending on how often you watch something. the point is, now that anyone can get or contribute content so, so easily, (insert your local cable provider/isp/cell phone service here) has less and less control over the market. my hope with net neutrality is that there now that we can bypass the "lay cable all the way around the world" phase with satellites, can't you see the harvards and stanfords, as well as the gates and bransons and buffetts of the world, fronting for a satellite to provide information to the people? i definitely can. hell of a tangent but something i've been wanting to write out for a while. carry on.
ben casnocha's observations on travelling and such. pretty amazing guy who's taking a year off between high school and college to travel. and he started his own company, about four years ago.
from get rich slowly, ten secrets of success by john paul getty.
ibid, how to raise a family on one income. unsuprisingly, many of the techniques for saving money are techniques for living sustainably.
and finally, how to protect your search information - i'm not sure there's an organization i like more than the electronic frontier foundation. [via]
I haven't read this yet -- but I've been hearing about it and reading references to it for a while. Then this morning, I was reading this really interesting article in Wired, and I get to the end and find it's an excerpt from this. More than enough to lead to an eventual purchase, the next time I'm in a bookstore. (I have too much to read and insufficient disposable income to buy things I'm not ready to read just yet).
[update] so i was cleaning up some bookmarks just now, and found that the Long Tail blog was somewhere I had glanced at, liked enough to bookmark, but never gone back to. Reading it over has me more enticed. At least one tenet of the book seems to be that the capacity of the general public to publish their own content easily (thanks to weblogs, the proliferation of digital cameras, etc) leads to the public not buying mass media as much (the decline of the blockbuster). One underlying thought I've always had about media piracy is this: hey, guys, maybe your music machine isn't a zillion-dollar business anymore. Maybe the fact that you've relentlessly pushed crap on us for years, forced our social perceptions, controlled our access to what used to be our property, and held yourselves up for worship doesn't work for the rest of us anymore, or at least an increasingly bigger part of the rest of us. It's kinda like the umbrella repairman blaming globalization for his woes.
[[update]] the reason i haven't read it yet is because The Long Tail was published today. I found that out through Anil, who in addition to being a 6A person, has a lower user number than I another site we both frequent. The point being that for all the things I absorb in a day, sometimes basic facts can go right by me. And also that Anil's thoughtful posts (such as his thoughts on the book) have helped me understand a lot about the web right now, and you should check him out. [This is good]
