There has been a lot of talk about Apple’s rumored new music service. If anyone can get it right, it’s Apple, but I don’t see how they can do it with the terrible mess that is music rights — you have to get things cleared three times and it is incredibly slow going, meanwhile the pricing models are just silly and not sustainable, and the incredible DRM encumberment makes the services even less desirable.

All that said, BusinessWeek seems to think they can pull it off, and, if BW’s predictions (more like rampant speculation) are true (and they can’t be, can they?), Apple would unveil an amazing music service. We can only wait and see what comes forth from Cuptertino…

Aaron Swartz on his trip to the sunny coast:

Despite getting lost several times on the way to Bab5, not getting anything to eat or drink, being too tired and hungry to keep up conversation, being shyly afraid of all these people I didn’t know, wearing new shoes that don’t really fit quite right, and staying in a dumpy hotel, I’m having the time of my life. I think the lesson here is that pain doesn’t keep action from being uplifting and comfort does little to keep blandness from being depressing.

Or maybe it’s just California.

I went back in the archive to see what my original response was to Sept. 11. Well, the posts from Sept. 1-19 are gone, so either I didn’t post anything (unlikely), or that important span of time was sadly lost in the Great Blog Recovery of 2002. That’s disappointing.

I actually was poking around because I’m trying to decide if I really like this design or not…I think at least the title bar things need to change, because they are too much like Wired News and not enough like a blog.

Update: Apparently there is something very wrong with the script that runs this blog, because the entries are in the database but have not been showing up on the page. I don’t know which upsets me more, that so many of my old entries have been hidden, or that no one noticed. 🙁

Additionally, you can check out the old design (and old entries) at a site I’ve just set up for that purpose.

Tom Tomorrow quotes and comments on Gary Kamiya’s Salon piece. First Gary:

I propose the following axiom: Those who did not believe and publicly state before Sept. 11 that Saddam Hussein represented an unacceptable threat to the United States have no credibility when they now argue that he does.

The reasoning behind this axiom is simple: The events of Sept. 11 have no relevance to the threat posed by Iraq, nor has any new information been unearthed since then about Iraqi threats. Therefore, all those who are only now calling for the U.S. to invade Iraq are basing their change of heart purely on an emotional reaction to Sept. 11, not a reasoned analysis of risk factors. This is an argument made in bad faith. For 10 years they were not afraid of Saddam Hussein. What changed their mind? The fiery spectacle of Sept. 11, they claim. Bush has invoked the date repeatedly as he has tried to scare Americans into supporting his war. But try as they might, none of these hawks in or out of the Bush government has been able to prove a connection between Osama bin Laden’s spectacular assaults and the Baghdad regime.

That this obvious point has scarcely been raised indicates the extent to which emotion, not argument, has come to dominate public discussion of this issue. The patriotic intimidation, the groupthink, the shunning and shaming of those who dared to raise unpopular perspectives — these reflexes still govern the national dialogue on Iraq.

Now Tom:

There’s more, and it’s good, so stop whining and go get a day pass.

Of course, if the administration were honest, if they treated us like growups, they’d acknowledge that most of the key players here–Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, et al–actually have been clamoring for a second gulf war since the mid nineties. But then they’d have to admit that this isn’t a response to 9/11, abandon the useful emotional argument. Because arguing that the Saudis are an untrustworthy ally and we really need a more secure foothold in the region to ensure control over certain vital resources of which Iraq has a plentiful supply–well, somehow that sort of strategic geopolitical gamesmanship may not be quite enough to convince Americans to send their loved ones off to kill and die.

Well, my internship at MP3.com has finally ended. Yes folks, its over.

I came to MP3.com nine months ago after having read this great review by Tim O’Reilly. Tim was really impressed with the shop — it was well laid-out, there was great communication, the office was structured like a community, there was leisure and there was work, and everything was written in Perl with MySQL, everything was custom and scalable, and MP3.com’s aim was to be as powerful as possible, adding 10 to 15 little features a day to their system. Beautiful, scalable, open, expressive, and, most importantly, groundbreaking.

Yes, groundbreaking. MP3.com was not working with the simple goal of getting rich (although that was a major motivating factor). No, they wanted to Change The World ™. I mean literally, change the way the world worked with respect to music. Put music everywhere. Lay the pipes and the groundwork so that they could be the water company of music. (Ironic, but more on that later). Yes, MP3.com was to be the pipeworks of music, delivering it on-demand to every part of the networked world. They were visionaries.

They were democratizing music. Allowing anyone to be promoted online, to set up a free site back when it was hard to get free sites, to host their songs and look at play stats and ask for contributions or charge for tracks. Their most wonderful gift was the My.MP3 service, a groundbreaking idea for music delivery. Their thought: buy a copy of every CD, rip it to mp3 format, and put it online. Let anyone, anywhere in the world put the CD they’ve bought into their CD-ROM drive, “beam-it” in seconds to the server, and then instantly be able to stream that music from anywhere to anywhere. This is when broadband was kicking off and spreading, this is when ripping MP3s was still difficult for the consumer. And this was a great service.

Ah, but I wasn’t at MP3.com then. I got there later.

MP3.com was floating on the internet bubble, but their business plan was viable. Like others they had squandered money like it grew on the trees of San Diego. But in the process they had built an infrastructure: one of the best Perl shops around. Case in point, and this isn’t common knowledge: PressPlay, the first of the RIAA’s DRM-encumbered music services, was written by MP3.com engineering staff in two weeks as a proof-of-concept to a few record labels. It was never even meant to be used. And yet it worked so well that tens of thousands of people used it, for a time, until MP3.com marketing dumped it to move on to better things.

Ah yes, marketing. I could have gone to work for the engineers, but I didn’t trust my computer skills yet. I decided to take a middle ground — not the vapid part of the business, and not the hard-core part: I was going to work for Product Development.

Product development — thinking up all those cool things that they think up there. Figuring out how they will work and tie together. Making plans and requirements documents and then getting back a finished product. I was promised that through one summer I would see a project from concept to completion. I was going to help bring about change.

And then I got there.

You see, in mid-2000 MP3.com launched their My.MP3 service, and one week later the RIAA sued them for $67 billion. Yes, billion. And the visionary founder of MP3.com responded:

“The RIAA’s action tells all of these thousands of consumers that they are not entitled to take their music into the digital age,” Robertson said. “Our service is nothing more than a virtual CD player. It is a new and innovative technology that lets people listen to their music. We have every intention of fighting [the RIAA’s] efforts to dictate the way people can use their music.”

New, and innovative, and thus a threat, and thus fodder for the RIAA, and thus subject to a lawsuit that destroyed the company, collapsed it in upon itself. In one move the RIAA had taken the most innovative music company in the world and utterly demolished it. And not long after, Vivendi, the French water company, bought MP3.com’s tattered remains.

When I got to the company Robertson, with all of his vision, had left. The engineering office I toured was teeming with new recruits as MP3.com’s engineering arm was in the process of becoming the one-stop web shop for all of Vivendi/Universal. And the original building, the one in which MP3.com was born, was a wasteland.

The remnants of the dot-com age were still there. Awesome metal cubicle dividers and fish netting, beautiful murals, recording studios, an arcade and lunch room, nice conference areas, Aeron chairs. Beanbags. Lots of beanbags. I sat on a beanbag one day while using my laptop to surf the net wirelessly. The other employees looked at me like I was insane. You can’t sit on beanbags and surf the web when your job is at stake.

The skelatal marketing crew (and product development seemed to basically be the same thing as marketing) was constantly working, typing, meeting. Lots of meetings. More meetings then work, really. And, as a consequence, no one could give me something to do.

They couldn’t even give me a computer.

Eventually I went downstairs and built one myself from spare parts, then had to finagle a monitor out of the equipment guys, then had to get a keyboard and mouse. They didn’t want to give me one of the expensive optical mice — the finance people didn’t like it when they gave those out to anyone but artists.

So I came to work each day, sat at my cube, surfed the net for a while, hoping someone would notice me. Checked out the bulletin boards and saw occasional postings from the engineers. Admired the backend architecture they had built, an easy and functional intranet that I sat around poking through while I waited for something to do.

Eventually I would ask someone for something to do, and would be redirected to someone else or told to come back later. Everyone was always working furiously or rushing off to meetings. Eventually I got a job under Andrew, who wrote the reviews among other things, and I got to write a few reviews. I got a free CD player. My reviews were too long for them, too in-depth, and too negative. They asked me to clean them up.

And then one day Andrew was laid off. And he was gone, his cubicle entry.

Once again I had nothing to do.

Eventually I stopped showing up. No one noticed. For all I know, my cubicle and the computer I built are still sitting there.

And now we get to why I am writing this entry finally, nine months after I began my internship. It is because I found out today that it is over. Over, kaput, kaplooey, ended, done, smack, dab, finished. I am out of MP3.com< Well, not out. I'm sure my ID card still works, and I could go inside any time i wanted. But I'm out of their online world, and thats all that was making my internship continue. No longer to I receive the inevitable weekly emails cancelling the communications meeting -- the time when random people can comment on whats going on with the direction of the company. I don't think they've had one in the entire time I was there. No longer can I check the stats and see how many people are visiting MP3.com, and how much they pay their artists, and how much it costs to run the various things. No longer can I see the crazy spreadsheets comparing the BBC to MP3.com in terms of features and other such marketing nonsense. No longer am I dsilverman@mp3.com And it isn't because anyone cut me off. It isn't because they realized I'm not there anymore. It isn't because someone finally cared enough to do something. It is simply because every few months the system sends you a reminder to change your password, and I got one in November, and I never got around to changing it, and now I'm locked out of the system. Their intranet is called Gotham. I am in it, along with the picture, same as on my ID card, my cubicle is hilighted with a dot on the map of the second floor of SD1. My position is "Non-Employee," their term for contractors and interns. My information is still listed. My account is still there. Twenty years from now all of the staff will have been laid off or fired or will have left or been replaced, and I still will be in Gotham, in that empty and dreary and dark database. The last remaining survivor of that once-wonderful notion that was MP3.com. I survived because I got sick of it, I got up and left, I left before my passion could be destroyed by the wreck of a company I once loved. My profile sits in Gotham, a testamant to what might have been, but now cannot be. It is lonely in here.

Wonderful news. All the nay-sayers were able to get the $50 million initiative down to $37 million, but they weren’t able to stop it from going forward, and now every seventh and eight grader in Maine has a laptop, and the effect has been astounding.

The New York Times article is decidedly upbeat, with one particularily good quote:

“We don’t have a pencil lab or put eight pencils in the middle of the room and have kids take turns using them, Computers are tools, and when every child in every school has one, it levels the playing field.”

So many schools do have “pencil labs”: at Foothill we had 1 or 2 computers per classroom — very useful. Our mobile lab had enough computers such that there was one per two students, and precariously balancing them on tiny desks inevitably led to breakage.

In Maine they told the children to take the computer and make it their own, to respect it and use it and take it home and bring it to school every day like a binder or a notebook. But this is the best notebook these students have ever had — one that is interactive and can access the internet wirelessly and lets you email your assignments to the teacher. Give the kids the tools they need, and the results can be astounding.

A suprisingly good 60 Minutes this week didn’t do any hard-hitting investigation, but had a nice report on Saddam’s finances followed by a fun report on SUVs. Fun, but not necessarily “balanced,” although I don’t know who they could have talked to representing the pro-Hummer crowd. I liked this report in particular because it looked at why people are obsessed with SUVs, instead of just stating that they are. Surpisingly, some of the reason could have to do with terrorism. SUVs make you feel strong, unconquerable, etc. Interesting.

The last report was about IIT Bombay, which they continued to just call “IIT” even though there are several branches…that was a bit confusing. Later they started talking about the rest of the IIT system. Anyway, this report on the India Institute of Technology, which Leslie Stahl compared to “Harvard, Brandeis, and MIT combined,” (no, just kidding, she said Yale), talked about the incredible workload on children hoping to go there and then getting in and then leaving India for more fertile grounds in America. There is a nationwide entrance exam and those who pass get their pictures in the paper.

One guy’s kid couldn’t get into the CS program at IIT, so he went to his backup school — Cornell.

Again I liked this report, because Stahl asked people why they were there and what they wre doing. There were some interesting revelations:

• Everyone who goes to IIT knows that they are the best and were chosen to come, so they work hard — there is no “corruption,” as they called it, no greasing the wheels and no trust fund kids getting into the school. It is all based on the six-hour test that children will study for for 4 hours a day starting at the age of 10.
• Students control a lot, from how the dormitories are run to sports teams to the cafeterias.
• Basic engineering skills are essential and required, liberal arts are ignored.
• Tuition is cheap, only about 1/5 the actual cost of attending — the Indian government picks up the rest.
• Only 3000 people are accepted each year, in a country of 1 billion, so you can bet they better not disappoint.

The one word that describes these people is “driven.” When you know how hard it is to get into school, it becomes a much more precious commodity. Maybe we need more of that here…the difference here is that college is no longer a treasured priesthood, now it is required for everyone. I wouldn’t say that is a bad thing, things just happen differently here, and we don’t necessarily learn all that we should. And on that same note, we aren’t all laser-focused on engineering. There are other things in the world.

All that said, I’m impressed with what they are doing in India.

I mourn his passing. And I was reminded of this article I read about him in 1999. Mr. Rogers was true and pure, something so sorely lacking our society, now and ever. He believed in the beauty of childhood, but at the same time he didn’t lie to children, or talk down to them. To me, he was, and is, a hero. Goodbye, Mr. Rogers. You will be missed.

An interesting exchange between the New York Times Magazine and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed BlBaradei.

NY Times Mag: “Whom would you rather have coffee with, George Bush or Saddam Hussein?”
BlBaradei: “I really don’t drink coffee.”

InstaPundit thinks its great that Brandeis has a “Pro-American” (i.e. pro war) group. I also think that it is great that we have one.

What he fails to realize is that United We Stand only has three members, one of whom chooses to remain anonymous. Not quite the “movement” that Reynolds implies.

Salon has an incredibly informative piece about the fallacy of the “war for oil” argument. A war for oil would raise prices in the short term, helping oil companies, but after the war prices could only go down, hurting them. Meanwhile, Russia, which relies on oil production for 90% of its economic output, would be devestated, as would all of our Middle East “partners in peace,” whose economies we would destroy. Meanwhile, US companies wouldn’t be enjoying the profits — it would be entreanched French and British oil conglomerates that would get the multi-billion dollar contracts to rebuild Iraq’s shattered oil infrastructure over several years.

War for oil? The Bush administration has done nothing but bungle this potential war, upsetting our allies and warning our enemies, using dangerous rhetoric and leaking strategies, and deploying a military that is woefully unprepared for the chemical and biological agents that Colin Powell so strongly states that Iraq posesses. If we’re going to war, it is for a variety of reasons that only Mr. Bush and perhaps his top advisors really understand. But it is not for oil.

Andy Rooney really pissed me off when he declared that the French of no right to criticize George W. Bush’s foreign policy because we saved them in World War II. I’ve heard similar sentiments from other people. I bash the French all the time, but not for any of these so-called legitimate reasons. I bash the French like I bash Canadians, because in American we overlook them, we hold silly and baseless stereotypes. When I bash the French, it is really a backhanded compliment, a bashing of America for being the great land of the free that just doesn’t want to worry about the history of freedom. I would never bash the French because we “bailed them out.”

Luckily, Molly Ivins agrees with me, and gave me the history that I wish I knew:

George Will saw fit to include in his latest Newsweek column this joke: “How many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris? No one knows, it’s never been tried.” That was certainly amusing. One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren’t many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Hitler.

On behalf of every one of those 100,000 men, I would like to thank Mr. Will for his clever joke. They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny.

Well, by the end of AMST 100b this semester, I’ll finally get the WWI and WWII history that I’ve always wanted but the public schools, with their focus on the American Revolution, never provided. Maybe because sometimes American wars can’t be glorified, and we just want to forget them? Well, if we’re trying to forget our history, it seems to be working splendidly.

Tony Almeida “worked” at Transmeta before moving to CTU. Wait…before? Neat, anyway. Although I have no idea what a “systems validation analyst” is. More fun “facts” on the 24 site. LIke Michelle built IPSec. These fictional characters have done some important computer work!

I put in a maintenance request to get my heat fixed, then I go over to Jeremy and suggest he do the same, so he does. So they came this morning and fixed his heat, then they left, and then it started with the whole blizzard situation. ARGH!!! I want heat!

I’ve watched it again this week, and my conclusion is this: 60 Minutes does not break stories. Like every other major television media outlet, they only report on “controvertial” issues when at least one authority figure is doing something about it. Basically, the news won’t report on something that goes against the status quo unless they can report on someone in power who disagrees. They won’t say that the war with Iraq might be bad, they will say that Senator so and so says the war with Iraq might be bad. They won’t report that there is a protest against war, they will report about how the protest is larger or smaller than expected and on what a politician says in response.

So in 60 Minutes case, all three stories here are about things that are already out there — a Senator is upset that the military isn’t ready for Nuclear/Biological/Chemical attacks, so 60 Minutes is worried (again missing the pesky questions as to “why” that they consistantly fail to ask). Fourth-eight states have sued Tenet Health Systems for medial malpractice, so 60 Minutes is upset. And Michael Moore already made his own controversy, now 60 Minutes can do a piece about him and his movie.

You call this hard-hitting journalism? Geez, I really hope Salon.com gets some money so they don’t have to shutdown at the end of this month. That would be a real shame.

H2G2 has a surpisingly insightful overview of Discordianism. I’m getting back into that, thanks to the urging of Matt Sachs.

We came upon the Native Americans and Australians when they were living in the Stone Age. Afghanistan’s violent meeting with our world has found them living in a mediaeval world. The gulf is not so great as it was with some cultures, but it is still difficult to leap in a generation. Muslim civilization and Asian peasant culture were so rich and worked so well for these people that they changed slowly, while the rest of the world moved on.

I found the pictures at http://cr.middlebury.edu/art/Powell/afghanistan/ and I got the inspiration to look for them after listening to This great TAL story.

“The person was vetted after Ashcroft used the information to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, and law enforcement determined it was fabricated,” reports Cannistraro.

The last eight days have been a complete sham. I ignore government-issued terrorism alerts. Why? They are propaganda put out by the government to instill fear. Don’t jump on this assertion, think about it, and try to fight it. We have credible information about a terrorism attack…but no dates, times, places, or people. We know something is coming, and then it doesn’t, and so it just fades from the public consciousness. Osama bin Laden may be tied to Saddam…except that he isn’t, at least according to the recently released tape.

Salon.com makes a bold assertion, but I think it is the right one: the administration is fanning the flames of terror so that people will be scared, fear will turn to anger, anger will turn to hate, hate will turn to war with Iraq. Yoda’s words played out in a (very) different context.

They bring up another good point, one that I hadn’t thought about (mostly because I didn’t know about the buildup) — the military is building up aerial defense capabilities over Washington. Missiles to shoot down ariel attack. But attack from whom? Not Saddam or Osama, neither of whom has any real air capability…do they expect an attack from North Korea? Or has a year and a half not been enough time to secure our airports? Here is the story.

I’d heard rumblings about the strange roots of International A.N.S.W.E.R., a major anti-war organizing body. First off, their name is too unwieldy, but I don’t think that is the complaint other people are bringing. Answer is tied to the Workers World Party, which in tern has some pretty…strong beliefs (which I have not read) about other world events. This of course was seized upon by right-wing media pundits to discredit the entire anti-war effort, which, obviously, is incredibly stupid, just like a lot of what goes on in the media. But one really must wonder where Answer came from and why they are in charge of this somewhat important movement. I found an interesting San Francisco Chronicle article that does a bit of digging into this issue. Its enlightening, but I wish it would have included more about how Answer came about.

Best Buffy in a season (mean recaplet aside). Thank goodness someone still has some creative juice to contribute. Please, more!

That is all.