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Monday, July 8, 2002
New Yawk stories 
Another retransmitter
Cast your peers (even if they can't act)
| | Peercast News - A Way.Nu Production exists, its slogan explains, Because Internet Radio is dead and corporate rock still sucks. |
| | Jonathan Peterson is behind both Peercast News and Way.Nu. Lotta good stuff on both. |
Here's your tea. There's your harbor. Have at it.
| | On the positive side, it puts in one place, in HTML, the government's whole freaking story. No .pdfs or any of that other nonsense. Makes it easy to search for answers to questions like this one, which I got from a reader today: |
| | Do these webcasting fees only apply to acts signed to RIAA labels? |
Imbalance of powers
Toward a Commons understanding
| | MediAgora is consistent with the Creative Commons initiative, but concentrates more on how the market itself works: who does what, who pays whom, stuff like that. |
Meetings of Twains
Isn't the market a wonderful thing?
| | Streamer is a modest but radical Internet radio transmission alternative that's getting some press because it can't be taxed, regulated or even traced. I was slow to cover it because it runs only on Windows, even though it's GPL'd. |
| | And once again we see what happens when fucked-over consumers give themselves the power to produce what the big fucking producers won't. |
Microclimate
| | There's a cloud in our back yard, which is bordered by the house and two huge oak trees. As a shape, the three dimensional space above the lawn isn't more than 50 feet across, but right now I can barely see through it. |
| | I just looked around the other sides of the house, and the air is clear in those directions. To the front, which faces North, the Santa Ynez mountains are dimmed by a bit of haze, but no clouds. The marine layer of low fog extends from the beach to our street. It's several hundred feet overhead, accompanied by this one rogue companion here in the yard. |
| | I'm tellin' ya, we never had this shit in New Jersey. |
Doing the math
| | Last night the kid and I were out on the roof again, looking at stars — a retun to our old nightly routine, which had been upstaged by welcome guests and festivities over the last few days. |
| | While I was setting things up, he hugged his favorite stuffed animal, Moo. "She's very old," he said. |
| | "I think she's about the same age as you." |
| | "Yep. Something like that." |
| | "It's a really big number." |
| | He was quiet while I continued to set up the rocking chair and the laptop next to it, running CarinaSoft's Voyager III (extremely recommended — try the download and run some of the demos... it's amazing). |
| | "Eight hundred thousand," he finally said. |
| | I sat in the chair and he climbed on my lap with Moo, and we went to the Heavens Above site, where we took a look at the roster of satellites that would pass overhead over the next few hours. The first one we saw was almost too faint to see as it slowly moved past two of the kid's favorite stars: Alcor and Mizar, the bright & dim pair in the Big Dipper that served as eye tests through the millennia when correction was impossible. |
| | The two stars make a visual double, but the kid wanted to know if each of the stars was itself a double. Zooming in on them wth Voyager didn't answer the question, so we checked with Google and found that Mizar is in fact a double-double: four stars. I had thought that Alcor was also a double, or maybe even a double-double like Mizar, but learned that's not the case. |
| | Still, the kid ran with it. |
| | "If Alcor and Mizar are both double-doubles, then they are eight stars." |
| | "That's right. But Alcor is a single. With Mizar's four, that makes five stars." |
| | But he wouldn't be deflected. "And if you've got two more stars that are also double-doubles, you've got two eights." |
| | "That's right. Which is how many?" |
| | "Really. How'd you get to that number?" |
| | "It's one less than twenty." |
| | "But two eights are sixteen." |
| | I started to explain, but he wanted to track the next satellite. After we saw it wasn't due for another twenty minutes, I told him it was time to sleep. He agreed, and I said it was time to say our prayers. I started by reminding him that many, many people loved him. "How many?" he asked. I started to count, and before I got to four he was asleep. |
Net radio listeners to RIAA: eat shit and die
| | Instead of instating the kind of royalty already paid to songwriters by both broadcast and Web radio‹about 3 percent of revenues‹the tariff on digital music is based on the number of listeners. So it's possible for the fee to exceed revenues, especially in a fledgling business where ads are scarce. |
| | So why are the record labels taking such a hard line? My guess is that it's all about protecting their Internet-challenged business model. Their profit comes from blockbuster artists. If the industry moved to a more varied ecology, independent labels and artists would thrive‹to the detriment of the labels, which would have trouble rustling up the rubes to root for the next Britney. The smoking gun comes from testimony of an RIAA-backed economist who told the government fee panel that a dramatic shakeout in Webcasting is ³inevitable and desirable because it will bring about market consolidation.² |
Whoa-fi
| | Says here in the New York Times that Tme Warner Cable in New York is sending nastygrams to cable broadband customers warning them not to share their bandwidth over wi-fi. |
| | So, once again, rather than trying to understand why customers might want to share a little bandwidth with strangers and other friends, and maybe coming up with ways to help or leverage the massively altruistic social phenomenon that the whole freaking Net in fact is (as, for example, the equipment guys are doing), the Industrial Content Distributariat does the utterly predictable. |
| | By the way, one reader suggests "wavechalking" makes more sense than "warchalking," and offers an acronym: Wireless Access / Visual Evidence. |
One reason I'm no longer a Verizon customer
Link of the day
Catch it before it's too soon
| | ...when a true revolution, or true paradigm shift, happens in science, the old guard is not brought along. They jump out of windows and shit. They kill themselves or they are so marginalized that they are never heard from again and eventually they die. |
| | That was from last Fall, not that it matters. We're dealing in durable verities here. |
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