Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Bad Cat Day

Clinton’s Waterloo?

Today we find out if the Hillary Clinton campaign is finished or still has legs. If she wins either or both of the two contested states today, this thing can drag on through more states. And in doing so, both Dems will be weakened and tenderized for McCain in the general election. If Obama wins both states, Hillary is done and Obama looks stronger.

But it’s no surprise that in the days before this critical election, Obama is starting to get hammered by stories in the press and intense questioning in press conferences. Hillary said she’d employ a kitchen sink strategy, and here it is. The Clinton operatives have planted as many negative stories as they can in the press. They even had Saturday Night Live pick on Obama while puffing her up at the same time (in one of the worst guest appearances I have ever seen). We’ll see if that works.

I have a feeling Hillary might squeak out one win today, probably in Ohio, and she will claim that’s proof she’s on a comeback.

There will be more and more pummeling of Obama if that happens, so by the time the Democrat convention comes down, it will be an ugly mess for them and they will have to paint on a smiley face of unity, but will limp into the general election where McCain has the opportunity whoever survived.

Quite frankly, The Dems aren’t looking as strong as they think they are. They may lose the election in spite of how badly Republicans have handled things in recent years. 

Monday, March 03, 2008

Filesharing is Good for Artists

I’ve been saying it for years and it’s becoming more apparent by the day. As record companies start to look at downloading as inescapable, and anti-piracy groups continue to get owned by pirates, one thing becomes clear. File sharing exposes people to material they never would have seen and allows them to try and sample new music, art, literature. Rather that hurting media companies, it may just save them. If they embrace P2P instead of fighting it and alienating their customers.

Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. “While downloads occur on a vast scale,” they wrote, “most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded.” Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought. “Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase.”

This long and fascinating article about piracy and the companies that fight them, shows that media companies, like governments, are fighting a losing battle against what the public wants. The artist are starting to embrace file sharing as this one film maker explains.

A new independent movie called Jerome Bixby’s The Man From Earth showed up on one of the file-sharing sites in November. The film’s producers had no idea it had even been pirated; all they knew was that suddenly its popularity was skyrocketing. Their websites received 23,000 hits in less than two weeks, and the film’s ranking among the most-searched-for movies on the internet movie-tracking site IMDB went from 11,235 to 15. Eric Wilkinson, the film’s co-producer, wrote a fan letter to the site responsible for driving traffic to the pirated film: “Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download.... People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the Net!” He requested that fans buy the DVD as well and added, “In the future, I will not complain about file sharing. you have helped put this little movie on the map!!!! When I make my next picture, I just may upload the movie on the Net myself!”

By the way, I just saw that movie (on a Netflix disc) and I highly recommend it. It’s about a man who claims to be immortal and has lived since caveman times.

Anyway, the future looks brighter for filesharing and dim for DRM and anti-piracy groups. The will of the people is hard to fight. The government needs to get a clue about a lot of similar areas its wasting our money on fighting. There are more important things to spend money on than lost causes.

You’ve Got to be Kidding

On sale at Wal-Mart?

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Be Positive

Really great advice. It’s important to be positive. I used to be a critical negative thinker for many years, without even realizing how bad I was. Complaining solves nothing and it makes people want to avoid you. It’s much better to figure out how to solve your problems and not complain about them. This guy is exactly right. If you live properly, good things will come your way. 

A Focus on the Future

Japan leads the world in robotics. They want robots to serve them rather than immigrants, which is why they haven’t loosened their extremely tight immigration laws. And this could actually be a boon to humanity, because we can’t continue to depend on people from poor countries to do all our dirty work.

One of the key differences between Japan and the US, is they don’t fear technology. They embrace it. Their fiction isn’t full of ways technology will be the end of humanity. Our Luddite mentality, our fear of progress has held us back.

Robots are already taken for granted in Japanese factories, so much so that they are sometimes welcomed on their first day at work with Shinto religious ceremonies. Robots make sushi. Robots plant rice and tend paddies.

There are robots serving as receptionists, vacuuming office corridors, spoon-feeding the elderly. They serve tea, greet company guests and chatter away at public technology displays. Now start-ups are marching out robotic home helpers.

They aren’t all humanoid. The Paro is a furry robot seal fitted with sensors beneath its fur and whiskers, designed to comfort the lonely, opening and closing its eyes and moving its flippers.

For Japan, the robotics revolution is an imperative. With more than a fifth of the population 65 or older, the country is banking on robots to replenish the workforce and care for the elderly.

In the past several years, the government has funded a plethora of robotics-related efforts, including some $42 million for the first phase of a humanoid robotics project, and $10 million a year between 2006 and 2010 to develop key robot technologies.

...

Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.

America was once the technological leader of the world. But as our education system worsens (see below) and our technological edge weakens, we really should be following the Japan’s lead and developing our own robotic answers to many of our problems.

Most of our robotic advances have been in the military, with drone aircraft and vehicles. That’s where we put our money and priorities in the field. Generally speaking, most of America’s technological developments came from either military research or the space program, then trickled down to consumers.

But that’s not a sustainable way of doing things. Billions get funneled down various rat holes and a few good things come out of it. A lot of it gets wasted. The Japanese just focus on what needs to get done and it’s paying off for them.

We should focus on the future.

More on Robotics here.

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Kids

A source of amusement or derangement. You decide.

Meet The Pika

Why Stateism Doesn’t Work

Government run schools are mired in corrupt unions and bureaucracies. The Democrats are constantly fighting against charter schools because the Dems support failed systems that are based on socialistic policies. Decades of failing government systems have led to this mess.  You need competitiveness to ensure some kind of standards. Private or charter schools are more likely to handle education in a superior fashion because they’re competing against other schools. When schools are ruled by one state bureaucracy, you see them fail as resources are distributed unevenly. Schools in poor areas always get shorted. And government employees tend not to care about work because they can’t be fired.

I know it’s not the same everywhere. Public teachers have many restriction on them, because the schools are afraid of lawsuits. They are limited in their ability to dicipline students, for example. Which is another reason why we should reassess how we do things. If the state makes it impossible for teachers to do their job, the state should get out of the way.

The public demands better education. The government will fail to provide it the more inept and inefficient their bureaucracies become, leaving way for charter schools to fill the gap. The only thing standing in the way are stateist politicians.

Let’s hope the Democrats wise up and stop blocking charter schools. 

Kidz Rock

Kids Songs Sung By Rock Stars - Watch more free videos