Some of this loss, doubtless, *is* caused by the copyright nuts.
However, another part is caused by the decline and fall of curated media (good record stores, good radio stations) in favor of search engines whose algorithms are basically popularity contests, gamed to sell ads. These show the fallacy of the long tail argument (tm), because - as this /. thread shows - the search engines, and predictive algorithms (if you liked xx you should like yy) herd people into more tightly knit winner groups. The interwebs haven't hurt Lady Gaga; they've crushed lots of minor classical ensembles.

Naxos recordings are hit and miss. Some good, some poor, none stellar ... it has breadth, but if you're looking for a breathtaking performance of Goldberg Variations, for example, you aren't going to find Glenn Gould or Murray Perahia or ... on Naxos.

IMHO: iTunes is (or at least was ... I stopped looking last year) pretty pathetic. Here's why. Suppose you want to listen to Bach suites for solo cello. Sure, they've got a version or two, but I want a version played by a master on a great instrument. Casals? Check, but old. Rostropovich? Nope, sorry.

Or, I want to listen to something (a lot) more current: Kronos Quartet? Some. Alarm will sound? ok. Bang on a Can? Nope, sorry.

It *does* seem to have both Glenn Gould recordings of Goldberg, which is an improvement (and, yes, they're very different).

This, especially the latter observation is surely connected to the recent /. discussion about use of computer-controlled instruments. It seems to have taken iTunes a very long time indeed to understand that two recordings of the same piece, by different ensembles or performers, using different instruments, under different circumstances, reveal the piece in entirely different ways. They're not the same thing.

There are two reasons firms do this:
1. The devices look prettier. This is the triumph of "industrial design" over function, similar to the way (it seems) Apple's industrial designers over-ruled the antenna / RF designers on the iPhone4. Same consequence: it's less easily usable, you have to learn to use the screen despite its failings.
2. Specsmanship. Glossy screens (called in the industry "glare screens", which really summarizes the issue) have higher contrast ratios - if the contrast ratio is measured in a perfectly dark room. Colors look nicely saturated. That way the vendors get to put very high contrast ratios on their specs and it's an arms race. Gottaproblemwiththat? Sit in a dark room, silly.

Of course, the only screens designed for reading (e-Ink, Pixel Qi, Sipix) do NOT use glare / glossy screens.

The patent troll reference in the parent article is irrelevant. Patent trolls are, in legal parlance, non-practicing entities. AUO is one of the big four makers of LCDs, with about $14B a year in LCD revenues. It has its own labs, does its own research, spends billions on fabs. Not sure why the first /. responses are ranting about the failure of the patent system - building an LCD fab is a huge financial risk, and finding a firm that is violating your IP and thus undercutting your market is a major challenge.

Surely: the logical thing for someone (not me!) to do is coordinate with Archive.org and then have them host it all in perpetuity?

We sometimes forget just how heavy water is, or how much energy ocean waves carry.

Some time ago, I did some statistical analysis of wave heights in Scapa Flow, not far away from the site proposed here in northern Scottish waters. It has very steady, large swells.

Imagine a wave (or swell) of 10m peak height, extending 2 km across, and 50m front-to-back. That's a nice 0.3 * 10^6 kg of water ... move it forward at 30kph ... repeat every 10 or 20 seconds, and you've got 10^9 Joules/second, about 1GW. For the surface wave. (More energy is transferred more steadily by sub-surface currents.)

Lunar tidal flows are so much larger than these that the prospect of drawing enough energy from open waters to do anything to earth - moon movements seem to be off by many orders of magnitude.

Full disclosure: I used to be a pretty good physicist, but that was a long time ago.

Perhaps phone companies really ARE evil, don't know.
But here's the way some of this works as a business:
1. Spectrum auctions (and landlords charging for antenna locations) are economically perfect mechanisms to drive the business case for wireless services to nearly non-existence. Spectrum auctions almost necessarily push telcos to pay nosebleed prices, just to participate. (The UK auctions were manically unhinged: they had a rider saying that BT would lose its GSM license unless it bought 3G spectrum. In consequence BT just about *had* to pay whatever it took, just to stay in business.) Auctions are not about valuing assets, they're a hidden tax. The cost of equipment is not nearly as critical a cost factor as the cost of cell sites (~100,000 per major carrier in the US) and the spectrum; both lack competitive supply/demand forces to contain them.
Likewise, landlords are armed with economic models and consultants that drive every last red cent out of business models too. Hey, that's how business works.
The cost of equipment is not nearly as critical a cost factor as the cost of cell sites (~100,000 per major carrier in the US) and the spectrum; both lack competitive supply/demand forces to contain them. Operating networks with tens of thousands of nodes in the USA's large landmass ain't cheap.

2. Along come smartphones and these and and apps, (and misleading marketing) create soaring basic demand;

3. Bloated apps (Skype, ugh), IP and (e.g.) the Van Jacobsen quickstart algorithm then take said traffic and inherently drive it to network saturation.

So: perhaps telco execs are satanic, let's get pitchforks and blazing torches.

But, the economics and technical dynamics of the marketplace are in inherent conflict. US gov't policies are at least as much to blame. And so are landlords.

The analysis can get much deeper - but without revealing a useful solution for the US, alas.

Were Douglas Adams still among us, he'd perhaps remind us that it could be a highway. Worse still, it could be a highway under construction.

It's a highway.

BUT the reason no Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1948, the year of Gandhi's assassination, was because he was the winner, and it's never awarded posthumously.

Some of the old data can be of great quality - so these exercises can be highly useful.

A couple of decades ago, I worked - as a student intern - at British institution. A question came in on wave heights in the North Sea ... a firm was wondering about engineering tolerances for oil rigs and such. I had to go to the data: much from the last few decades was already computerized and I did a quite stats analysis - and was surprised at how many BIG waves were observed. This would be very costly to the rig builders ... so I was told to go and re-sift the recent data and dig up older data. The recent data sift yielded the same output. The old data ... going back to the 1700s ... showed the same statistical patterns (so long as you squinted at it a bit - the responsible sailors either were not at sea and certainly were not taking measurements in big storms, or didn't get to survive). The outcome was - as I recall - that in this particular spot of the North Sea, you'd see a wave (or cluster of waves) over 40' high every two or so months.

The reason for the tight correlation, of course, is that the data was being taken the same way: sextants and the like, with data literally tabulated by hand: and - registered vessels had someone on board whose job it was to take and log the data - it wasn't something done ad hoc. The systemic errors were consistent for two-plus centuries. Data since the 1980s is automated and since the 1990s is from satellite maps.

Where do you live? I was thinking of coming over and stealing your stuff, since I think I deserve it more.

... like network-based virus blockers bring several good things:
* an entirely different set of algorithms can be used, leveraging data and traffic patterns not specific to the message contents
* a team of engineers not tied to a single enterprise

And, indeed, major network operators like to do stuff like this - takes traffic off the network, and relieves enterprises of evil traffic forms (including DDOS)

BUT then, net neutrality purists, like 4chan, despise this and fight back, as recently when AT&T worked to thwart a large-scale DDOS attack.

About 5 years ago, I led a private project that looked at the terms most often searched over Limewire, Napster, etc. The results were most similar to those of an academic study that emerged a bit later: the most commonly-searched terms were NOT popular songs or p0rn. They were pings for bank account information, SSNs and passwords.