I’ve heard the phrase “I need it” far more in the last few years than ever before.  I’ve often wondered when it was that computers stopped being just a useful tool and more of an essential service.  I like my computers, I’d be grumpy if I couldn’t use them, but I’d survive.  But the way I hear some customers talk, it’s like they would die without them.

That can’t be normal.  Humans got along just fine up until the 80s without personal computers.  People now seem to be ranking computer technology on the same level as heat and electricity.

If computers are truly that important to you, you would think you’d have a spare.  That’s what I do.

I know that sounds funny, but having leftover parts is one of the most infuriating things in the world.  You get the thing back together and it works, but then you realize there is this one little screw sitting in the tray.  Why is it here?  Where did it come from?  What did it hold?  Dismantling the thing again to find a home for the little bastard sucks.

Unlike a certain other one I had to do, the Compaq I was working on today only required around 50% disassembly.  But I must say, Hewlett Packard… tape?  Computers shouldn’t be held together with masking tape.

On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

from the New York Times

What I’m trying to figure out is why people would ever tie control of their power systems to something as insecure as the Internet.  Internet has all kinds of cool uses, but trustworthy or reliable are not attributes that immediately come to my mind when I think about it.

The Internet is this wild west kind of a place, the whole point of it is to be open and that makes any part of it open to attack from anyone on the planet.  Would you trust your power grid, or any critical infrastructure to that?

FBM posted:

“In Canada, that’s not happening and it’s not happening because we have a culture here where people just assume it’s free. People are simply abandoning the marketplace altogether, and they’ve made the decision they’ll just [steal] the music and worry about how the artist gets paid later.”

But to a Canadian music _is_ effectively free.  You listen to it on the radio for free, you listen to it on the TV for free, you listen on Youtube for free, hear it in the elevator for free and you can download it for free.  Someone in the industry knows that people are getting paid behind the scenes for all that, but to a regular Canadian, the value of the music itself is zero.

People always assumed that the money you paid for the album was for the album itself.  Or the money you paid at a concert was for putting on the show.  The idea of something untouchable being worth something doesn’t make a lot of sense to many people.  Especially if they are copying the ‘property’ and giving it to a buddy with no money changing hands.  If indeed the artist deserves a percentage, what is 50% of zero?

You can’t stop people from downloading.  They don’t want to.  They have these crazy laws in the U.S. and it hasn’t done jack.  I know if you are an artist, the idea of people downloading your stuff and not paying you seems unfair, but that’s the reality and no amount of legislation is going to change that short of the death penalty.  Do you really want to live in a society like that?

I think instead of pulling out the legislation bat, I think artists and the record companies are just going to have to dream up new ways to extract money from their fans.

This is sort of for Ryan.

I know this musician guy, J Brian.  One man show.  No record company.  Plays in bars and at weddings and stuff.  When I first met him, I think he was charging $300 for a gig, maybe more, and he was doing them three days a week.  $900 times 52 is $46800.  This isn’t counting the CDs of his stuff he flogged at shows.  One year he even was asking for tips so he could get some fancy new speakers or something.  He exceeded his fundraising goals.

Even if we assume he was having to expense $7,000 on professional gear and fuel, $40,000 a year isn’t too bad, better than a lot of Canadians, and pretty good for just playing in small venues like bars.

He owned his house, his own car, went on vacation for a few weeks of the year.  Basically an average Canadian.  If he wants to make more he could try bigger venues, but I think he just likes the small scene.

I guess the point I’m trying to make that one can make a living as an artist without help from a giant media company.  There seems to be this attitude some have that music artists are all supposed to be rich and it just isn’t true.  If you are the kind of artist who can sell a million albums and pack 50,000 in a stadium, well fine, but the notion that a record company is required to have a career just isn’t true.

For Ryan.

That J. Brian guy I mentioned writes plenty of original stuff and some of it is quite catchy.  I’m pretty certain he’s a member of SOCAN, I just don’t think he’s ever been interested in playing large venues.  If anything, he’s read the market he’s got access to correctly.  Pay on par with the service.

Only in the IP market do people think that one creative or innovative work should be a jackpot for the rest of their lives.  You think Michelangelo got paid for every time someone gazed upon the Sistine Chapel?  He did the job, he got paid for the job.  This is what most of us in the world do.

The downward slide in the perceived value of music began when it started to be treated less like a work and more like a product.  Naturally, people want to get the products they buy at the best price possible and free is that price, which is what the Internet is giving them.

Don’t misunderstand, I know darn well artists gotta eat too.  But perhaps this whole idea of forced payment for merely possessing a copy of someone’s IP is the wrong one.  Up until the 20th century, musicians were paid by patronage, by the job, ticket sales to shows and by asking nicely.  People basically paid what they thought it was worth.

I will throw this out there, however.  What the CRIA is doing isn’t right.  People copying my stuff and giving it to their friends is one thing, but re-marketing it for profit is quite another.  I know that sounds sort of hypocritical of me to say, but if you see music as a work then people sharing it free is just people sharing culture.  I don’t think this is a behaviour which should be punished.  If a publisher thinks he can make a buck off it again, as if it were product, the honourable thing to do is give the artist a cut and the contracts should be negotiated to reflect that.

Ryan does raise a good point.  Being a session player or a cover guy is a way to make a living, but if you want to get your original stuff out there and make some decent money, it’s hard to pull that off alone.  Not every great artist is good at promotion or even knows how.  Large scale sales, the organization and promotion of large concerts is not something a guy can do alone.

A change in record company business practices is maybe what’s needed, because I think they’re going to die in their current state.  Part of a problem is they are still organized like a thing with produces works on physical media, a market that’s rapidly becoming niche.  Another part of the problem is I think they now see themselves as more intellectual property companies instead of promoters because they have become used to the idea of owning the exclusive rights to music works.

Maybe U2 gets the royal treatment from their label, but most musicians signed to a label seem to be getting treated as employees rather than clients.  You hear stories of artists cranking out half-baked albums because they are desperate to fulfil a contract they don’t like (Nirvana) or artists who sell zillions of units but wind up with nothing (Bay City Rollers).  No one benefits from that.

These things could be fixed.  If the record company never owned the rights and behaved more like a marketing and services company with the artist as the client, I think the both could do nicely.  Artists who think they’ve got a great song to sell could hire as many firms as they want and drop firms who didn’t give them what they wanted.  I think the record companies would have to shrink to accommodate this, but since that’s happening anyway might as well try something new.

Not every day do you see a company do a 180 in the face of massive online protest.  But it is happening more often and it is doing wonders to expose the stupidity of large corporations.  Legions of CBC readers commented on the story linked above.  Here’s one of the comments that probably got Loblaws scared:

Ok I can now stop shopping at Loblaws and Superstore. What jerks. I’m sure they have already been compensated by insurance for their actual losses.

I have two words for the lawyers in the Loblaws legal department: epic fail.

Well, here are some more words.  Your little quest to get $40,000 out of a guy who has lost his wife and seven kids from the local sports team he coaches is the stupidest idea imaginable.  Did it ever occur that the public might actually be offended by something like that?  Some of those 650 posters really aren’t going to shop at your stores again.  How much business do you suppose you’ve just handed to your competitors?  I’ll bet it’s at least 10 times the amount you were seeking.

Grow a brain.  That’s your free advice for today. If you would like more, I’m always available for hire.

Keep in mind that no one actually knows about the long term health effects of millimetre radio waves or backscatter x-rays.  Supposedly they are safe.  X-Ray techs wearing those lead lined smocks must be just paranoid, right?  Maybe I’ll go into business making lead-lined underwear for regular air travellers.  I think there could be some money in that.

Also keep in mind this will do very little to actually stop terrorists.  They aren’t even trying that hard.

Section 3

The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.

This is one of Arctic Cooling’s massive, passive GPU heatsinks.  In this guy’s rig there is maybe a half inch of clearance between the top of it and the port side of his case.  If you look close, I even bothered to stick these cute little heatsinks to all eight of the DDR2 microchips.  I did the northbridge on this system too (annoying work at the best of times) and had to mod the GPU heatsink slightly so that it would fit over top the fairly tall CoolerMaster Blue Ice northbridge cooler.  And yes, the fan on it glows blue.  How l33t is that!