1. Get your name added to an opt-out list, such as the Do not Call list.
2. Unscrupulous individual obtains opt-out list with your contact info and sells it to Nigerian spammers or other foreign group.
3. You wind up getting more BS than your friend who didn't sign up for that opt-out list.

Precisely this happened with Canada's do not call registry. I didn't have my name added to it, thankfully. However, in today's information market, opt-out lists would have to be highly secure to have even a remote chance of working as intended. However, unscrupulous spammers have to be able to access the opt-out list to tell if you've opted out! That's a pretty huge gaping security hole built in.

Bottom line, the more opt-out lists you sign up for, the more spam you're opting in for.

Note: For the legally squeamish, I shall be referring to two fictional torrent trackers: "squeak" and "pancakes". The rest of you can just deal.

Once upon a time, I was one of the music industries greatest customers. When I was in highschool I'd make a weekly pilgrimage to the big record-store downtown and spend hours scouring the racks for tunes. I'm old/young enough that, at first, it was tapes, but I later progressed to CD's. My earliest albums are all popular well known artists, but I soon began to branch out into other genres that were, at the time, marginal. Classical. Electronica. You name it.

In the late nineties I started using Napster and a variety of other sharing sites, but sweet, glorious usenet above all else. Sure, you needed luck and a commerical usenet account to find what you wanted but, if you could find it, it would download. (rather than sitting at 32% like so many file sharing networks of the day!) It was like a smorgasboard. You could just download things at random and find yourself on journeys of musical discovery. I was still buying a lot of albums in those days. Primarily albums from groups I discovered through usenet but hadn't been able to find anywhere. (These were often ordered through the mail.)

I always felt a little guilty about hanging onto digital copies of albums I had downloaded without buying, but I figured things balanced out since I was really spending more money than I could afford on music anyways. Then, Metallica started suing people and Napster got shut down. Usenet was still fine, but suddenly the relationship between artists and fans was tainted. I know it's not justifiable. It's illegal, immoral, whatever. But I haven't bought a single album, online or otherwise, since that day. I can't explain it, but suddenly a group I loved was calling me a thief. I realized it was true, and strangely enough, I stopped caring.

For a while I continued downloading music through usenet, but that phase sort of waned. So much was being posted there that it was taking hours a day to sift through just the lossless groups. For every great new track I found, I found hundreds of tracks I loathed. I'd find artists that cut one decent song in their careers and then nothing but crap. My music collection stood still for several years.

Then squeak came along. Instead of passively sipping from the usenet garden-hose, you could actively search for music that interested you. Squeak had almost *everything*. Odds were that, if you could think of it, squeak had it. Unlike open torrent trackers like TPB or the various sharing networks that came before, the closed ratio-enforced nature of squeak ensured that whatever you did find downloaded nearly as fast as if was coming off of usenet. The comments people posted to torrents were frequently a goldmine of information for finding new music too. My collection expanded quite a bit during these years.

Then, one day, squeak was shut down. I really felt cut off from music that day. iTunes was going strong, but even they had relatively little compared to squeak and, at the time, the quality of their lossy AAC tracks was poor compared to the lossless that was so easy to find on squeak. I realized that squeak really was something special, and just as I used to pay a monthly fee for usenet I'd have gladly paid a monthly fee for Oink. Why couldn't the record industry find some way to provide that service and take my money? I didn't feel guilty about pirating music, but I did feel weary of moving around trying to find music in the "old ways".

A little while later, while casting about for an oink replacement, I got an early account on "pancakes", but it sucked. There was nothing there. It felt like a refugee camp, except all the cool people had gone to some other, cooler camp and this one was for the rejects. Eventually, I despaired and went through another dark, period of zero-musical discovery. My original pancakes login was soon forgotten.

A while back, somebody sent me an invite to pancakes and I figured it was worth another look. What a difference a year or so had made! The selection was still not up to squeak's standards, but pancakes was doing some new things that were exciting. The front page was filled with well-written articles on obscure genres. Bands were actually releasing albums here! Obscure, unheard of bands, and they were getting their music out to thousands all around the globe. Instead of feeling like I should feel guilty, I felt good when downloading bands that wanted their music out there. I'd pass their stuff around to friends and some of them would wind up really enjoying it.

So what does the future hold? I feel pancakes is on the right track, provided they can avoid being sued into non-existence like squeak. There is definitely an opportunity here for artists. Perhaps not the sort that will generate filthy lucre in the traditional sense... How many bands really wind up doing a lot better than breaking even with the record companies anyways? We're also beginning to see music (e.g. Kleptones) that is flat out illegal due to copyright law, yet of genuine artistic merit. Some artists are learning to live outside the law, and we're all richer for it.

For better or for worse, file-sharing is here to stay. Commercial services like iTunes will probably also thrive, provided they keep their prices realistic. However, does there really have to be two streams of music? One legal, and one not? Can we not find a way to bring services like pancakes into the fold without forcing them to drastically cut their selection by requiring them to work out deals with individual idiotic labels? Like squeak before it, I would gladly pay for pancakes. For me, it's no longer a matter of wanting to go legitimate. I just don't want to find myself cut off again.

Although I have mentioned feeling guilty about not paying for music, I am in Canada, and I have not explicitly broken the law by downloading music. Here, there are levies on blank media, such as CD-Rs, mp3 players, etc. that go to artists, and downloading music is legal here as a direct result. (Something that CRIA is desperately trying to change, since the DMCA worked out so wonderfully in the U.S..) Perhaps it would work if legislation were enacted that would allow sites like pancakes to operate legally by collecting monthly fees from users and distributing the proceeds directly to artists according to download-share, whether those artists have agreed to such a relationship or not. Sort of a, "Fuck you guys, here's your money" relationship. It would be a lot like iTunes, ironically...

I know, I know. I'm reaching here. A lot of people are now so opposed to the record label's legal bullshit that they couldn't stomach a cent of their money going to them. Still, I think we've reached a point where RIAA, CRIA, etc. have demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to come to terms with market realities and build a mutually respectful relationship with their customers. I'm a canuck, so I believe in the judicious intervention of government in industry. (The same sort of thing that has kept our banks solvent and bail-out free!) Call me dirty names like socialist if you want, but socialism in moderation works.

Where does that leave labels? Artists are still going to need help producing albums and setting up tours. Maybe it really should be harder for up and coming artists to get millions into debt for a fancy first-album. Maybe they should have to do some cheap, basement albums first to get the cash up for a slick and glossy production. It would certainly reduce the number of artists who wind up in debt-for-life to the labels. Instead of controlling the artists, maybe the labels should be providing a service to artists. If the artists get their money directly from pancakes, iTunes, etc., they will be the ones with the power, not the labels. That scares the hell out of the labels, but I like the idea myself.

Then maybe the media levy that is currently distributed amongst artists should also be distributed to truckers too?

Problem solved.

Long story short, Canada doesn't have a copyright problem. Tweak the levies if you want, but don't blow a good thing. DMCA style laws haven't worked anywhere else they've been implemented. The Canadian levy system shows far more promise. Heck, maybe the U.S. should be adopting our levy system instead of trying to make us adopt their horribly broken and ineffectual laws!

While there are lots of little things in this article that indicate the author has never used anything that didn't come out of Cupertino, the one thing that bugged me the most was his willful ignorance of preemptive multi-tasking.

In preemptive multitasking, the OS gives each application running a time-slice to do their thing and then, typically, takes control and gives the next app it's turn. This means you can put any program you want in the background and it will keep on running. We take this for granted today, but prior to 1995, most users never had this luxury. Amiga was probably the earliest OS to go sort of mainstream that had preemptive multitasking.

The article says:

"It wasn't until the late 1990s that Windows NT, OS/2 and the Mac OS were able to multitask as well -- and they required vast hardware resources to do it."

Wrong. Windows95 had full preemptive multitasking. It didn't have protected memory. That feature would stay in the NT stream until XP. However, mainstream MS users enjoyed preemptive multitasking from 1995 on.

MacOS, on the other hand, never had preemptive multitasking. Later versions had cooperative multitasking which relied on programs being specially written to support it. However, just one app running without that support was all it took to bring your Mac to a screeching halt. The late 90's were a horrible time to be a Mac user, and Apple's market share declined sharply during this period because of how primitive the last versions of MacOS were compared to everything else on the market. After the return of Jobs in the late 90's, Apple started to turn around by making flashy hardware, colored iMac's, those god-awful puck-mice, etc.. It wasn't until OSX came along that Apple was able to attract (at least some) users more interested in working on their macs than in how they looked.

The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous. The rest of their operations are similarly inefficient. They're going to have a real tough time competing no matter what they make.

Personally, I say let the big auto companies die. It's going to be a clusterfuck, but we can't just keep bailing them out year after year. Remember, the current dire state of affairs has come about after a decade of prosperity, and this isn't the first bunch of government cash they've asked for and gotten(in Canada at least)! The important thing is to find a way to keep workers employed and parts companies in business.

What is needed is not more of the same incompetence from the big 3. What is needed is for proven companies who know what they're doing in their respective industries to take over the auto plants. It's not very enticing though. These plants have the wrong equipment and the auto unions will probably make all sorts of trouble for them. This is where the money saved not bailing out the big 3 again and again can be used to offer incentives to lure these companies in. Likewise, parts companies that are run competently should receive short-term loans to help them transition to working with these new industries. Government intervention should be used like a surgeon's scalpel. Cut out the cancer and reroute blood to the healthy tissue.

Master of Orion 2 differed from MOO1 in several fundamental ways. Most of those ways involved added minutiae to the game that didn't really add to the strategic depth of the game.

Take buildings for example. In MOO2 (and every bloody civ-in-space game since) you can erect specialized buildings on your planets that focus the planets production. There is a tiny amount of strategy in the order of building things, but once you figure out an optimal build order for different types of planets it's just an annoying game mechanic that gets in the way of expanding your empire, saying "Nice doggy!" to your would-be enemies while you research a bigger stick, etc..

Really, this sort of thing ammounts to shoe-horning an inferior version of sim-city into a game that doesn't need it. However, it's in every bloody 4X game people make these days, with Stardock's own Galactic Civilizations being one of the worst offenders. In MOO1, you could just set a slider telling each of your planets how much to devote to industry, research, ship production, etc..

This is the philosophy I would like to see the MOO franchise return to:

Create simple, intuitive, direct ways to manipulate a deep and complex system with cleverly balanced AI.

e.g. To allow players to focus production, give them a simple control, such as a set of sliders, instead of a sim-city clone mini-game.

Now, I know a lot of people love MOO2 and building buildings. It's a good game, and the mechanic is now utterly ubiquitous. However, if you liked MOO2 you can go play GalCiv or any of dozens of games that have all the same mechanics. If, however, the MOO franchise were to go back to it's MOO1 roots and try to find other ways for players to interact with the universe, we might finally see the ossified 4X genre evolve a little!