Very interesting massage of data. What strikes me is that this decrease shows up despite the greater ease in "sampling" from other artists that modern technology has afforded. You would think that there would be a greater CPY or at least that the practice of sampling would eliminate the decrease seen since copyright law took effect. So the damping effect of copyright on creativity may be even greater than your estimate.

And it may be reasonable to conclude that the more government tightens its control of who can play or listen to music, and certainly over who can modify it, the greater the decline in creativity in society as a whole. Not good, grim outlook in fact.

I suppose it will take someone well funded enough to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. Given their surprising interpretation of the First Amendment recently, I suspect they would rule in favor of creative freedom.

I completely agree. A major problem is that our system rewards the most egregious control freaks with more and more power.

We seem to operate out of a misplaced Puritan holdback of 'any freedom is evil' and 'humans are inherently evil and must be controlled lest they be themselves', which could only equal evil in this mindset. It's completely ass backwards and results in a total thwarting of creativity.

Without an atmosphere of assumed trustworthiness, how can our society thrive and move forward at all? The music industry (and the film industry) are symptomatic of a much bigger problem. I believe it needs to be fought against aggressively and nipped in the bud before government usurps any more control by crushing individual freedom and creativity. But I don't have any good ideas of how to stop this nauseating trend.

I've overheard it even in companies where I've worked for years, usually in the form of "go get the IT guy" or "I think the IT guy said to do it that way." And no, I don't sport the gender-blurring unibrow. I figure it just reflects how all those lowly non-IT types see us as one single flavor of non-human. That's ok: fear breeds compliance.

Crap. Now I really feel old, even though technically I'm not. So the old adage really does hold!

There's a fundamental difference between a brand new technology and yet one more way to get around Windows' inadequacies. We know that Windows sucks yet has the world's majority of software written for it. This is not going to be a Windows killer. Great if some people buy this, but I don't think it's going to make Phoenix much money or make Microcrap quake in their mink-lined boots.

It's a solution without a problem. They tried similar tacts on the Mac twice, the latest being Parallels (god save us from Bootcamp) and VMware still has no real user base, especially given knoppix and linux live. It just seems like a non-issue. Corporations won't support it and individuals will make the decision to run one OS or the other based on how much they hate microstiff or the apps they have to run.

Harsh critic--the article doesn't boast about solving theorems or offering 100% certain proofs. It is sufficient to bring to greater notice that this pattern, which had gone unnoticed, has now been noticed. Maybe someone will do something further with it. Sooner or later it's likely that this piece of information will get incorporated into something economically useful. But for now, as pure science, noticing the pattern that had not been noticed before is good enough for publication.

I am currently a fulltime college student and all 3 of our large (200+ node) computer labs are totally full from 7:30 am to 11 pm. It would be a burden for every student to have to buy all the software we need for classes (MS Office is not worth any $$ but we have to use it). Also, it is always slower to connect to the campus network from a wifi laptop than a hardwired connection. Labs also provide immediate IT support if a printer suddenly gets uninstalled, as well as a centralized place where instructors can make themselves available while students work on assignments in a new or specialized application. I think any school that abandons computer labs in 2009 will have to restore them by 2010.

I think it's fine to have a debate about gun rights, but my question is about the ergonomics of this modified gun in particular. The trigger is ok at the thumb, but I am concerned about the stability of aim with the barrel between two relatively weak fingers that don't get a lot of practice in holding items still between them. So, speaking as a gun owner, I think it's fair to say that this weapon, or medical device or self-protection device or whatever you want to call it, will need considerable practice to master and probably ongoing training with it to keep the fingers strong enough to steady the thing in an emergency.

Another question that comes up, what caliber is this gun? What is the recoil like? I sure wish it was a 2-handed hold instead of 1.

And lastly, there are a large number of young people with rheumatoid arthritis or other degenerative joint diseases that would be able to use this. So, while made for the elderly, whose hand joints tend to be less mobile than the young, it could be a benefit to quite a large swath of our population.

If he really wants Americans to participate in the Web 2.0 community, Obama's first acts should include improving high speed access for the masses. How embarrassing to lag even behind Estonia (no offense to Estonia). We need more people hooked up to high speed net access and high speed needs to be just that, instead of sometimes so-so speed.