the art of writing is discovering what you believe
They already have the celebrity playlists, which are interesting, but now (well, as of a week ago) Apple’s music store is offering their own sampler: 15 tracks from recent releases.
And as it happens, I have $15 sitting in my account @ the iTunes Music Store, too . . . .
I want to be able to view the books I have
* checked out
* placed on hold
for all the libraries to which I belong. This would require some authentication, but I suspect that’s not a showstopper.
As it stands now, to check the books I have out (20-30 per week/library visit cycle), I have to:
* login to the library’s website/authenticate
* request a listing from my account,
* and then write down the names (printing them would be wasteful).
Why not an RSS feed? Then I can just call out the names and let my little bookworms go gather them.
I shouldn’t grumble: my two local[1] libraries[2] already do so many things right (they have websites, of course, but also allow you to query their databases, order books, request purchases, etc., including emailing you when ordered books come in).
Wired 12.03: Some Like It Hot:
If piracy means using the creative property of others without their permission, then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of big media today – film, music, radio, and cable TV – was born of a kind of piracy. The consistent story is how each generation welcomes the pirates from the last. Each generation – until now.
Interesting. Haven’t read the book yet, but it will be worth reading to learn more about how the media companies are so outraged by someone doing to them what they did to others. It seems to me the big media companies of today — Time Warner, CBS, Disney — go back far enough to have profited from one or more of these waves of change. Now they shocked, shocked to learn there’s copyright infringement going on . . . .
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 29, 2004 – March 06, 2004 Archives:
So, to get a feel for the impact of these attacks on the country, the number of people who lost loved ones, know others who did, and so forth, multiply that death toll by 11 or 12 times in order to get a feel for the number in American terms.
A good ballpark point of comparison is what it would be like to have around 2000 people killed in one day in this country. And, of course, that’s not that different from the 3000 who were killed here on September 11th.
So multiply each victim of the current instability by 10 or so to get a sense of how painful their liberation is proving to be. And picture how it would play out in domestic newspapers, to have 2-3,000 worshippers killed in places of worship on a religious holiday.
So how to make use of the the CD settlement checks we’re all getting? (You did get yours, right?)
Some folks are putting their money where their beliefs are: they’re signing them over to Creative Commons or the EFF.
I decided to take a different approach and find some way to reward good behavior: I bought a $15 iTunes Music Store prepaid card at my local Target. Selfish? Maybe. But I want to see an experiment like this work for everyone: the artists, the fans, even the greedy music cartel.
Of course, I can’t even figure out what I want to buy, now that I have some money to spend.
I added a new button/banner on the NASCAR area (what I call the proliferation of affinity stuff at the bottom left) in support of the labor movement. My recent gig at the UW taught me a lot about the value of unions, collective bargaining, and advocacy.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the email granting me permission to use the icon, with a salutation of ‘Dear comrade.’
++I {black heart suit} unions.++
The Big Picture: What Will Determine the Outcome of the 2004 Election:
My own theory about the economy is all over this blog, but to reiterate: We have just come out of the biggest bubble in Human history. There was massive overinvestment, tremendous overspending, all of which has lead to significant overcapacity. In a post-bubble environment, one cannot merely stimulate your way out of the business cycle. What it will take mostly is time — something no President wants to say. “Hey, voters, just wait a decade or so and jobs will return.”
During the interregnum, policymakers can identify the biggest obstacles towards job creation, and do what they can to remove them. They may determine its rising health care costs, or high taxes on small businesses, or its the expenses of IRS filings for new workers, or litigation exposure or whatever. Identify the key issues, and deal with them.
There’s the entire election for you: How the Jobs issue gets defined. The party out of power has a few months (at most) to clarify this definition. Since they have a contested primary (while the incumbent party does not), they have an opportunity to frame the issue, and to some degree, define the debate in a very public manner — for now.
Like pére, like fils? George H. W. Bush was stunned by a supermarket scanner, demonstrating how out of touch with commonplace reality he was: is W going to show us the same thing by ignoring the fact that the world has changed and the old rules of “wait, cut taxes, and see” don’t work? And can his opponents make anything of it?
Forbes.com: The Coming RSS Revolution:
Lately, news Web sites and those of online diarists have discovered the joys of syndication and publishing RSS feeds, and this makes the act of keeping track of them much easier for readers.
Take for example, the growing popularity of desktop RSS reader software. We’ve been using NetNewsWire on an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) Macintosh for the past several weeks and have come away thinking there may be a future in this RSS thing.
It’s What’s For Dinner
From a memo distributed in May 2002 to meat inspectors by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. [Harpers.org]
People eat this stuff? (categorized reluctantly under Food).
It is difficult to read this and believe that exchange rates are not seriously out of whack.
[ . . . ]The other point? Americans often wonder if the Indians feel the pain and worry of Americans losing their jobs to cheaper workers elsewhere. They do. They’re deeply worried about low-priced competition from the Phillipines.
So what happens when there’s no place left to send the work to?
If I’m reading this right, the nations/regions reaping the benefits are former colonies (India, the Phillipines, in this example) who are leveraging the educational and other infrastructure benefits they inherited. And why not? But what happens when the industrialists run out of cheap labor pools?