I must say that I agree with the ‘freakish’ness of all the items mentioned in this author’s post. Frankly, I’m somewhat embarrassed when I travel abroad and the folks I am visiting ask me “WTF are you nitwits doing?!?!? You are surprised that the rest of the worlds hates you?”.
I simply shrug and tell them, it’s not my fault, I didn’t vote for the clown. And, as it turns out, neither did most people, but that is a different discussion.
This is when I repeat to myself “less than a year… less than a year…”.
Sony has completed the DRM-free MP3 trifecta (Warner, Universal and Sony/BMG) for Amazon; they now have all the major labels, along with a significant number of indie labels, available for download.
This is clearly a move on the part of the labels to balance the field a bit against Apple’s iTunes Music Store; something that must be giving His Steveness a bit of bile to vent.
Frankly, I don’t give a dingo’s kidney what Hist Steveness vents, as long as we have a credible source of DRM-free music. It’s been a long, painful, frustrating road but it appears that the labels have finally seen the error in their ways (treating customers like criminals) and given those of us that enjoy our digital music on something other than an iPod a marketplace.
Now, if we can just get them them to provide it with a lossless codec encoding… 😉
So I went back and read a few of my old posts today while updating some of the system software. The piece I did on popcorn toppings, which is one of my most popular posts, is rather good if I do say so myself.
Some days I wish I wasn’t so damn driven to innovate that I forget to do a bit of navel gazing on a daily basis.
I live on a fairly busy street and the amount of trash that we collect from drive-by dumping is astonishing. The majority is beverage containers but there is also a good amount of plastic of various forms. I thought we had a lot until I read this article.
All that plastic that you dump into the trash doesn’t always end up in a landfill/incinerator. We consistently throw away one small grocery bag’s worth of ‘trash’ on a weekly basis; we recycle one, sometimes, two bins of glass/plastic/metal weekly. By weight we recycle far more than we trash. Sadly, we are still in the majority.
I weep for the future of our planet; it won’t matter to me because I’ll be nicely decomposed by the time this really comes to a head but for those Billions of us still around it’s going to suck big time unless we start making significant changes NOW.
This shot of Quincy Jones that I took at the 2006 CES show was recently selected to illustrate his Wikipedia entry.
I learned a bit about Wikipedia in the process. I tag all my Flickr photos as CreativeCommons:Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs which, in English, means you can use my photos in original, non-commerical works as long as you give me credit. However, Wikipedia allows only Attribution and/or ShareAlike licenses. ShareAlike allows a use as long as the work in which it is included is also licensed as ShareAlike. Basically, if I share with you then you must share with others.
I can understand the NoDerivs (No Derivatives) liscense being a problem since in this case the photo was to be a part of a larger article. The part that confuses me is the requirement that I remove the NonCommerical limitation. Last time I looked (about 4 seconds ago) Wikipedia did not include ads, nor does it charge for access to the site. Perhaps they are girding themselves for the day when they will.
Digital Media and whatever else flows through my head…
