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Apple’s Ace in the Hole: Music Industry Stupidity

Technology News: Music: SpiralFrog Hops Into Digital Music Pond With Free Downloads

Undoubtedly, the greatest challenge to Apple’s dominance of the digital music market has come from the Russian pseudopirates allofmp3.com. Fortunately for Apple, allofmp3.com was shut down recently by a Russian court responding to international charges of piracy, but unfortunately for Apple, another Russian court recently ruled that allofmp3.com’s operation are legal, and allofmp3.com will be operational again, soon.

In the meantime, the American record industry has been wasting its resources with perhaps the dumbest idea ever to emerge from this industry: www.spiralfrog.com. According to the article linked above:

Once downloaded, the user can play the songs via a PC through Windows Media Player or a portable player that supports WMA files. SpiralFrog doesn’t support playback on Apple’s (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPod line or even Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Zune, nor does it provide a solution for Mac OS X users. The service only works via Windows XP or Vista PCs.

Furthermore, the user must remain active on the web site while songs are downloaded one at a time.

In other words, the recording industry has elected to challenge Apple’s service–which is functional and portable on Mac and Windows platforms–with a service that is functional only on the Windows platform and portable on no platform: the songs cannot be transported even on Microsoft’s Zune player. Spiralfrog.com seeks to challenge Apple by offering none of the features for which iTunes users are willing to spend hundreds of dollars (on an iPod, iPhone or other media player), and then charging the users by taxing their time in front of the computer.

Virtually all economic systems–barter, capitalism, communism, etc.–are based on the principle of quid pro quo, exchanging this for that. In total ignorance of the centuries of economic development that have resulted from the acceptance of this principle, the American recording industry is putting its weight behind a system that gives users absolutely nothing in exchange for their time and trouble. If spiralfrog.com is to be in anyway construed as a symbol of American capitalism, then heaven help the United States. The country will collapse under the weight of such stupidity long before any terrorist group can dream of executing another well coordinated attack.

As long as Apple’s iTunes Music Store is countered by such moronic efforts, buy Apple stock. 🙂

PS Universal Music has an inkling of business savvy left in its brain trusty by virtue of the Gbox service that it started in collaboration with Google. Unfortunately, this service is still for the Windows platform only, but it does sell DRM-free music in mp3 format. So, it may well become a viable challenge to Apple. PNM

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“Bush is a Moron” Declares Alan Greenspan

Greenspan Is Critical Of Bush in Memoir | washingtonpost.com

The meaning is quite unmistakable. The implicit comparison between Clinton and Bush (W) made by Greenspan in the following paragraph (page two of the article linked above) necessarily leads to the conclusion stated in the title of this post.

However, he calls Clinton a “risk taker” who had shown a “preference for dealing in facts,” and presents Clinton and himself almost as soul mates. “Here was a fellow information hound. . . . We both read books and were curious and thoughtful about the world. . . . I never ceased to be surprised by his fascination with economic detail: the effect of Canadian lumber on housing prices and inflation. . . . He had an eye for the big picture too.”

In the rest of article, of course, Greenspan lambastes every Republican official from Bush down to Hastert and DeLay. His acerbic language (in the context of Greenspanese like “irrational exuberance”) leads one to think of how incredibly poorly these politicians must have acted in order to draw the ire of the most stolid man on the planet. Greenspan’s reaction is not just extreme by Greenspan’s own standards. It is unprecedented in American history.

Is it not?

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A Hopeless Cause?

Presidential Approval Ratings Since 2001

W approval ratings since 2001
If politics is a popularity game, then this graph paints a rather hopeless picture for the future of warmongers.

And a hopeful one for humanity.

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Scientific “Charity”

BOINC

Whatever one might think of SETI or UC Berkeley and the idealists who work there, one cannot deny that BOINC is a remarkable outcrop of SETI@Home, SETI’s effort to distribute computing over millions of computers all over the world.

SETI@Home led to Folding@Home, Stanford’s wonderful effort to distribute the significant computing effort of the bioinformatics of protein folding. By now, there are countless other @Home projects of this sort, like Einstein@Home (for astronomical calculations) and BelgianBeer@Home (which doesn’t specify what its computers do). A fairly long listing can be found here.

Now, BOINC is a general schema that runs on all platforms and can be used by anyone to start a distributed computing network. Whether you want to spend a little bit of electricity every month to donate your computer’s idle moments to a cause, or whether you want to harvest the computing power of others for your own cause, BOINC is available.

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This Is Your Government on Iraq

Program shows CIA behind Wikipedia entries – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

With their baffling means of operating, the CIA and other US government agencies have given Wikipedia the greatest endorsement of legitimacy. If the greatest institutions that the US government has erected in the service of dissembling and misinforming have elected to target Wikipedia, then it must be the case that Wikipedia is a superb and reliable source of information.

Why theese agancies care to modify the entry regarding Adam Smith may remain classified for eternity, however.

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One Manual the White House Has

White House Manual Details How to Deal With Protesters – washingtonpost.com

Why is it that there is so much more documentation of the GOP’s expertise in staging appearances and playing dirty politics than there is documentation of expertise in military and economic theory and management? When they are compared with the military failures in Iraq economic discord here in the US, the public relations successes of the White House strongly hint at the distinct absence of manuals for economic and military success.

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Beauty

YouTube – Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina answers a question

There is little doubt that this young woman’s public humiliation is being exploited by the neanderthal institution of “beauty contests” to gain free publicity for an event that hardly gets any attention anymore. Women will feel vindicated. Men will drool over a woman who is clearly beautiful and manifestly dumb and pliable. And, the entire ruse might actually work.

One question is, will she get her fair shake? Probably. The other question is, what does this do to the credibility of the “smart is the new sexy” billboards that have cropped up all over the skyline of the primordial soup?

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Second Modern Record

Second modern uptime recordpMac keeps chugging along. After four years, two operating system upgrades, one hard drive failure (and swap) and compiling about 10 gigabytes of software, it keeps going, better than ever it seems. This is the second uptime record that I have managed to record, and it was halted only because I misinterpreted a wrong password as a subsystem failure.

Oh, well. There’s always the coming year, I suppose.

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Woe be the US Economy

Cisco CEO sees strong world economy, U.S. bumps – washingtonpost.com

There is ample political criticism in the commentary of CEOs like Cisco’s John Chambers. All CEOs of major American companies see opportunities for growth in every corner of the planet except in the United States. If this does not frighten people of the political establishment in the US, then it ought to give them pause, at the very least, when it is time to digest claims that slashing taxes and deregulating markets are beneficial. After all, according to CEOs, the net effect of reducing taxation and relaxing regulations in the US has been the creating of economic growth outside the US.

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A Crime Spree in Berlin

At least the jail food will be free… | Oddly Enough | Reuters.com

Ah, to dream of the life of comfort, of the life of freedom and of a life of peace of mind. A life where this qualifies as a crime spree.