RIAA sues AllofMP3 for $1.65 trillion

 

 

This is absolutely insane.

Basically what the RIAA is saying is that the Russian website, AllofMP3.com, has caused $150K of damages for each of the 11 million mp3s that have been downloaded from that site.

How this is possible in the era of 99c dowloads is beyond me. That's a max of $11M in damages, besides, the RIAA would only get a portion of the 99c from each song from iTunes.

This is ridiculous.

OK, they were selling IP that they didn't compensate the rightsholders for. True.

But $1.65 trillion dollars? This sounds like something Dr Evil would threaton. Just to compare, Canada's 2005 GDP was $1.11 trillion dollars. So that's the entire economic output of our great nation for one year's worth of damages done by one website.

Insanity.

http://www.zeropaid.com/news/8175/RIAA+sues+AllofMP3+for+$1.65+trillion

2006 Darwin Awards

#1: (August 2006, Brazil) August brings us a winner from Brazil, who tried to disassemble a Rocket Propelled Grenade (RPG) by driving back and forth over it with a car. This technique was ineffective, so he escalated to pounding the RPG with a sledgehammer. The second try worked--in a sense. The explosion proved fatal to one man, six cars, and the repair shop wherein the efforts took place. 14 more RPG grenades were found in a car parked nearby.

Police believe the ammunition was being scavenged to sell as scrap metal. If it wasn't scrap then, it certainly is now!

#2: (17 April 2006, England) There's always someone who thinks good advice doesn't apply to him. For example, if a doctor advises that the one thing you must not do is go near a flame, as you are going to be covered wtih a flammable material, most people would take this advice onboard, and not strike a match until the flammable material has been removed.

However, Phillip, 60, knew better than his doctor. Philip was in the hospital to treat a skin disease, said treatment consisting of being smeared in paraffin-based cream. Philip was warned that the cream would ignite, so he definitely should NOT smoke. But he just couldn't live without that cigarette."

Smoking was not permitted anywhere on the ward, but Phillip took this setback in stride, and sneaked out onto a fire escape. Once he was hidden, he lit up... inhaled... and peace descended as he got his nicotine fix. Things went downhill only after he finished his cigarette, at the moment he ground out the butt with his heel.

The paraffin cream had been absorbed by his clothing. As his heel touched the butt, fumes from his pyjamas ignited. The resulting inferno "cremated" his skin condition, and left first-degree burns on much of his body. Despite excellent treatment, he died in intensive care.

#3: (2006, England) The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who, uh, remove themselves from it...

Like two people, 17 and 20, who imitated Darth Vader and made light sabres from fluorescent light tubes. That's right, they opened up fluoresceent tubes, poured gasoline inside, and lit the end... As one can imagine, a Star Wars sized explosion was not far behind. One died, the other survived to 'fess up to their creative, but stupid, reenactment.

http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin2006.html

U.S. Admits That Polar Bears Are At Risk

Science is a tool, like a screwdriver or a hammer. It just is, it's how you use it that's important. It won't uncover all the truths, instead it helps weed out those that aren't true or aren't provable. Don't use science or attempt to invoke it's credibility if you aren't willing to stand up to it.

I have some training in science, although I wouldn't consider myself a scientist. However, if we lose our rational heads in the name of politics, we can become lost along the way and the very kind of people the scientific establishment complains about -- the kooks that won't listen to reason.

However, if we choose to use science as an empirical path to knowledge, it has rules, and like any other path you must follow them. Here's a concise set from wikipedia:

* Observation. A constant feature of scientific inquiry.

* Description. Information must be reliable, i.e., replicable (repeatable) as well as valid (relevant to the inquiry).

* Prediction. Information must be valid for observations past, present, and future of given phenomena, i.e., purported "one shot" phenomena do not give rise to the capability to predict, nor to the ability to repeat an experiment.

* Control. Actively and fairly sampling the range of possible occurrences, whenever possible and proper, as opposed to the passive acceptance of opportunistic data, is the best way to control or counterbalance the risk of empirical bias.

* Falsifiability, or the elimination of plausible alternatives. This is a gradual process that requires repeated experiments by multiple researchers who must be able to replicate results in order to corroborate them. This requirement, one of the most frequently contended, leads to the following: All hypotheses and theories are in principle subject to disproof. Thus, there is a point at which there might be a consensus about a particular hypothesis or theory, yet it must in principle remain tentative. As a body of knowledge grows and a particular hypothesis or theory repeatedly brings predictable results, confidence in the hypothesis or theory increases.

* Causal explanation. Many scientists and theorists on scientific method argue that concepts of causality are not obligatory to science, but are in fact well-defined only under particular, admittedly widespread conditions. Under these conditions the following requirements are generally regarded as important to scientific understanding:
* Identification of causes. Identification of the causes of a particular phenomenon to the best achievable extent.
* Covariation of events. The hypothesized causes must correlate with observed effects.
* Time-order relationship. The hypothesized causes must precede the observed effects in time.

This in short is what science is. Anyone that says that their data or theory is "scientific" must follow these rules. I'm sorry to say that many in this field that say this don't and are misleading seekers such as myself, and should be discarded as such -- unless you are looking for simple entertainment.

You can see why science has such problems in climate change, like many paranormal or fringe areas. You can form theories but you run into problems with prediction, control, and falsifiability. These allow an opening that the US government has used to further it's own political ends until this point, where it's both too late to stop and so abundantly obvious that they've switched to damage control.

Of course there are other paths to truth, but if you're going to use this particular one, follow the rules.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20061228.POLAR28/TPStory/National

Smallest Life Form Discovered

In a mine in California, scientists found the smallest bacteria so far discovered -- living in conditions as acidic as battery acid. Why this fascinates me is that one of the problems with the ALH84001 Martian meteorite with potential nanobacteria in the 20-100 nanometer range is that they were too small. The bacteria found in California were in the 200 nanometer range, only twice as big as the artifacts in ALH84001.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/23/MNGETN57UQ1.DTL

Einstein's Unfinished Symphony: Listening to the Sounds of Space-Time

Very well written account of the history of Einstein's last unconfirmed hypothesis: gravity waves. He postulated that they would be small but detectable and strangely enough be in the audio frequency range.

This book is lots of fun and gives an insider account of the still unfinished search for these waves. From the foibles of Joseph Weber's first mistaken reports of gravity wave detection to the construction of the massive $365M LIGO detector.
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Unfinished-Symphony-Listening-Space-Time/dp/0425186202/ref=pd_rhf_p_1/102-2845328-8416163

Best Open Source Tools

After almost a year of pretty much exclusively using open source tools at home, here's my list of indispensable tools:
Gantt Project. This is a great java-based project management tool. Because it's java, it works in windows, linux, and one would presume, osx.
Open Office. What better enabler is there than a free, robust office suite. It's bloated, a bit buggy and slow, but frees you from the shackles of needing Microsoft Office.
FreeMind. This is a very robust and reliable java-based "mind-mapping" tool. I can't really describe it except to say that it's great for brainstorming in a non-linear fashion. I use it for goal setting and idea generation.
The GIMP. Want 60% of the functionality of Photoshop at 0% of the price? The GIMP is easy to use, flexible, and a powerful image editor.
Nvu is a descent wysiwyg html editor that handles divs and layers very well.
Firefox. 'Nuff said.
Amarok. Best player there is. Handles your collection, downloads the artwork, builds dynamic playlists, has ipod connectivity, talks to last.fm to get suggested tracks -- I don't even use playlists anymore, I queue up a few tracks that I'm in the mood in and I let Amarok/last.fm suggest the rest.

War Games 2: The Dead Code

Wargames 2 has begun filming. Hopefully will not suck. Man, is hollywood out of ideas.

Plot Outline: Computer hacker Will Farmer (Lanter) engages a goverment super-computer named Ripley in an online terrorist-attack simulation game. Little does Farmer know that Ripley has been designed to appeal to potential terrorists, and certain glitches have turned made him become paranoid.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0865957/

NASA Telescope Picks Up Glow of Universe's First Objects

New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope strongly suggest that infrared light detected in a prior study originated from clumps of the very first objects of the Universe. The recent data indicate this patchy light is splattered across the entire sky and comes from clusters of bright, monstrous objects more than 13 billion light-years away.


"We are pushing our telescopes to the limit and are tantalizingly close to getting a clear picture of the very first collections of objects," said Dr. Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., lead author on two reports to appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Whatever these objects are, they are intrinsically incredibly bright and very different from anything in existence today."


Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars -- humongous stars more than 1,000 times the mass of our sun -- or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies containing a mass of less than about one million suns. The Milky Way galaxy holds the equivalent of approximately 100 billion suns and was probably created when mini-galaxies like these merged.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2006-22/release.shtml

Your new IT budget: $10

Someone that gets it.

Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate many small businesses to allow them to innovate. Let me make a prediction: large-scale IT in small-to-medium businesses is going to rapidly decline. The era of IT shops having 5-10% (or more) of corporate budgets is over, and good riddance. Now, the following offer from Google comes with advertising, but what do small companies care? Why deploy big email/web servers with the corporate apps and why pay the Microsoft tax? You can run the full Google suite below on Linux on cheap hardware with broadband internet access, which you are most likely paying for anyway.

From the article:

It's pretty amazing to think about what a company can now get for $10 a year:
And, by incorporating some other free Google services, the company also gets:

• A complete, web-based IT infrastructure for its business
• A custom corporate portal/intranet for its employees
• Corporate e-mail service
• Corporate instant messaging
• Calendar software and services
• Web-site design software
• Web-site hosting
• Word-processing software
• Spreadsheet software
• Web-site analytics

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/your_new_it_bud.php

Bigfoot! : The True Story of Apes in America

A very fun little book from Lauren Coleman on the facts, and fiction behind the myth of the great north american ape. Well documented, humorous but deadly serious at the same time. I waffle on the topic -- on one hand I want it to be true, but on the other as the population of Canada and America tops 400 million I am skeptical.

I do have some personal history on the topic. I'm reminded of the summers I spent up at my uncle's cabin in the backwoods of B.C. One day we went out and talked to one of his neighbors who showed me casts that he had made on his property nearby of these large footprints. Now, I was probably 8 or 9 but these things were freakin' huge -- the length of my torso or so and so big I could barely lift them. My uncle seemed to take it seriously but maybe it was just for my benefit. The summer or two before, my best friend and I had gone to the small theater in Drayton and saw some kind of Bigfoot documentary where hunters went off and found Bigfoot with dramatic results -- they threw rocks down on the cabin the hunters were staying in and had to be fought off. We spent many afternoons after school in the woods around Drayton setting up bigfoot detection traps and looking for footprints.

Who knows? Another family member swore he saw what at first looked to be a bear while rafting down the North Saskatchewan river near town. It was in the water and looked up when the raft approached, then got up on two legs and ran away like a man.
http://www.amazon.com/Bigfoot-True-Story-Apes-America/dp/0743469755/sr=8-3/qid=1166418845/ref=sr_1_3/102-2845328-8416163?ie=UTF8&s=books

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

A fun enough movie with great effects. Leaves you hanging at the end waiting for number 3, which is frustrating.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383574/

Mashup Corporations

Gotta admit, this was a pretty good book about SOA that nailed a lot of the important points. Don't look for the great American novel here with it's business story example of Vorpal, Inc. but the salient technical and cultural points are met.

Look, IT has missed the boat in nearly every shop I've been in as far as the business is concerned. We think big, we think enterprise, and we think perfect. The executive wants that because they are thinking of cost reduction/containment and a strategy to move forward and that's what IT says -- you'll get the benefits if we just keep throwing money at complexity. But the general business population doesn't want this. They want a quick, cheap, flexible solution. Now. Not in 18 months after then next 3 million dollar upgrade. Not the inflexible ERP screens they've been given. Just something that works. Today. And, by the way, can I get it on my blackberry?

SOA, Agile, and the WWW give us that. But it gives us a lot of headaches too. Like security. And scalability. And the biggie - loss of IT control. If we let the business mashup their own apps to meet their needs, what do we do when the phone rings to fix an app we didn't build or architect? Don't look for all the answers in this book, because nobody's got them. But we've gotta move faster, more cheaply, and more flexibly if we're going to harvest the big gains promised by the massive "end-to-end" solutions offered by the big ERP systems. SAP is SOA-enabled, so is Microsoft. The book offers the great advice that I've been trying to give our leadership for the past 6 months: stop thinking big, stop thinking end-to-end and 3 years out. Let's build something now with the tools we have.

So what are we waiting for? Let's go.

Good quotes:

"Replace the big project mentality of IT with a build-and-run-fast culture."
"Good enough, rather than perfect, is the target when systems are not built to last."
"Mobility is not an afterthought."
"There are only two types of standards, essentially: any standard that is relevant to the success of a group or industry in question is good, and any standard that isn't relevant to success is bad."

http://www.amazon.com/Mashup-Corporations-End-Business-Usual/dp/0978921801/sr=11-1/qid=1165957495/ref=sr_11_1/103-6384050-3430252

Simplicity Is Highly Overrated

Really, really stupid article that completely misses the point. The author takes “simplicity” to mean “less features” but in my mind it really means a lack of clutter. In electronic devices or software, this means that a control’s behavior is obvious – take the jog wheel of an iPod or a button labeled “search” on a web page. You know what it’s going to do before you use it. One question in the article is around control – if you have control over all the little features of a product, don’t you feel better? Not in my mind, especially if you can’t figure out WTF the control is supposed to do. You end up afraid to touch it. Additionally, ease of use doesn't necessarily mean a lack of features. Take again the iPod. Really complex little gadget. 5 buttons and a scroll wheel. Does pretty much everything you need.

In shopping, this means that the features of one product are obviously different from another, and stores that understand this sell products well – and don’t confuse the customer. At Superstore you get 15 different kinds of jam at different prices. I bet they sell less jam than Costco, which maybe has 3-4 different kinds.

In life, I think this means that your purpose is obvious and clear, with little clutter or distraction getting in your way. Often this means decluttering the house and your life. A good example for me was selling my beloved Talon. It was a great car that I enjoyed greatly, but simply didn’t fit in with my new family life. I had to downsize and downgrade on performance and picked up a used 4-door Audi A4. It’s a fine car that’s enjoyable to drive, but it’s safe and can fit two kids.
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html

Burnout

This is an excellent article on burn out, and very accurately describes what I've been feeling. It's difficult to explain, and you feel stupid even trying to complain about it, but it's there: I'm burning out. Life is great. I work for a great company and I'm making piles of cash. I have flexible work hours, can work from home one day a week, and have the respect of my peers. So what's the problem? It's a nagging sense what Spock said in the first Star Trek movie: "Is this all there is, is there nothing more?"

I've worked hard since getting out of university. For ten years. I've consistently gotten very positive reviews in my career, with one "average" exception (I quit very soon after). But where am I? Caught in middle management, a cog in a wheel. Do my decisions matter? Does anyone care? Five years ago when I was purely technical I was sure that what I did mattered. Now that I've seen the other side of the looking-glass I'm not so sure. What we do really doesn't impact the bottom line that much. It's just that simple. Much of the productivity gains from technology have been exploited; email, the web, word processors, project planners, etc have all been done. We've seen so many failed "killer apps" in the past five years that were supposed to "revolutionize business" that we've all become jaded.

Technically, SOA looks like it will have some real gains on the technical side so that still interests me. But what else? After you've done 100 JADs and have implemented Agile and Test-Driven Development, what else? After you've gotten the accolades for accelerating deliverables while driving up quality, what's left? There's also the law of diminishing returns. For me to take the next step with leadership, I have to do a lot of work - MBA, take more risks and responsibilities at work, basically work my ass off for the next five years. To do what? Move up into upper-middle-management? Is that what I want to spend my life doing?

A similar thing with Aikido. I'm now Nidan, a second-degree black belt. I've reached the place where I can no longer rely on my Senseis for instruction, I need to dive deep into the meaning of Aikido to synthesize my own understanding to reach the next level. It'll take another 4-5 years and be a huge struggle and risk to get to Sandan, the third degree. After that is the end of the middle part of practice, past Yondan (4th degree) - you get promoted not through technical testing but by your contribution to the spread and depth of the art. I want to continue, but after 13 years of training my work has just begun. How much more will I get out of it? How much more am I capable of understanding and how much work will it take?

Here's some quotes from the article:

Like the science of all emotion, attempts to quantify, analyze, and define burnout have a slightly stilted, unnatural quality. It's a problem that's both physical and existential, an untidy agglomeration of external symptoms and private frustrations, how could such stuff be plotted on a graph? (I keep thinking of Bill Murray and those golf balls, or Bill Murray and his Suntory whiskeys in Lost in Translation, for that matter. Does a culture even need a definition of burnout when it has Bill Murray?) But researchers have nevertheless made valiant efforts to try. In 1981, Maslach, now vice-provost at the University of California, Berkeley, famously co-developed a detailed survey, known as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, to measure the syndrome. Her theory is that any one of the following six problems can fry us to a crisp: working too much; working in an unjust environment; working with little social support; working with little agency or control; working in the service of values we loathe; working for insufficient reward (whether the currency is money, prestige, or positive feedback). "I once talked to a pediatric dentist," she says, and he said, "A good day is when there are no screamers." And I'm sure half the people he was talking about were the parents.

http://nymag.com/news/features/24757/index1.html

NASA Announces Water On Mars

I'm currently watching the live feed and it looks like NASA is announcing the presence of water in the near surface of Mars -- namely in the form of saturated sediment (mud). They've seen evidence of water that boils off rapidly in the thin atmosphere of Mars during small avalanches in the mid-latitudes. They're talking about a handful of swimming pools of water in each event. This is the "Squirting Gun" for water on Mars.

There's also a serendipitous discovery of new dark spots on Mars which have appeared in the past few months. They look to be very recent impact event craters which allow us to see the subsurface details from Mars which haven't been eroded. In essence, you can go look from orbit at the geology of Mars without digging. The bad news is that ~12 big impacts happen per year and may be hazardous to astronauts on the surface.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/jpl-mgs-20061206.html

NASA Plans Permanant Moon Base

In my mind, this is a huge waste of effort. Put a base on Mars instead of the Moon -- there's huge science finds waiting there to be discovered; a whole new ecosystem that we've barely touched. The Moon won't be a stepping stone for Mars, it will cost nearly the same to get there as Mars, and we've already been, why go back?

But the tech looks cool.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6208456.stm

A few filthy rich own half the world

The middle class is well and truly dead. How does this bode for countries like Canada, who were built for and by the middle class? Time will tell...

"The richest two per cent of adults in the world own more than half of global household wealth, according to a study released on Tuesday.
In 2000 the richest one per cent of adults owned 40 per cent of global wealth, a report by the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) said.
Its comprehensive study of personal wealth has revealed that the richest 10 per cent of adults accounted for 85 per cent of the total global assets. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely one per cent of global wealth."
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/725095.cms