Isn't it ironic: Bush indictment on war crimes in the World Court!

During the discussion of Cringely Proposes a Music Sharing Alternative I came across Brad's idea

Here is my take on it:

Consider this, you buy the song when you hit play for $1.05. When the song stops, the company buys back the song for $1. Company just made $0.05. You just got billed for $0.05. You no longer own the songs, company can sell it to the next member.

Let's assume some numbers:

• 100K members.
• 2M songs.
• Max songs played at the same time: ~100K (high usage).
• Avg songs played at the same time: ~10K (daily avg).
• Favorite song copies needed to be owned: ~1K
• Avg. number of copies per song needed to be owned: 5 (maybe lower).

Some deductions:

• 2M * 5 songs = 10M ~ 1M CDs ~ $20M inital layout.
• 10K songs played constaly for $0.05 per song. A song is 5 min long. That is 10K * $0.05 = $500 every 5 mins = $6K per hour = $144K per day.
  Ergo profitable in 139 days.
• You do not own any songs, but you can play any at any time for 5c per song.
• If you play music 15 hours a day 30 days a month, then with 5c per 5min song you would end up paying $100/mo. This however means CONSTANT MUSIC TO YOUR EARS FOR ALL YOUR WAKING HOURS!

If lowering sale price to $1.01 per song:

• Comany makes to 1c per song, and still it is profitable in a year and a half!
• UNLIMITED music cost you $20(!!) per month.

Enhancements:

• As per Mr.Sharpy (472377) suggestion 20% of income can be returned to artists. My idea would be 10% to the song's artist (to reward popular artist for their hard work) and 10% toward a music artis fund (to support innovation and up-coming artists)

Bad stuff:

• If you burn it to cd, you brake the law.
• Streaming is the only way you can access
• Only works with instant online connection.
• Fad songs lose money, as you need to own more copies for inital interest, after which there will be no more interest.

I have been thinking about for a while about why-oh-why do we like food that is greasy, sweet and high in calories?

My guess (creationists would likely to contest this, but they can and will go to hell anyway) is that it has evolutionary reasons. For the survival of the species, the individual needs to survive. It needs to acquire as much of calories (energy) as possible. Therefore if we adjust this indivual to seek out the higher calories (by creating a preference for sweet=sugar (4 Cal/g), greasy=fat (9 Cal/g), umame(~meaty)=protein (4 Cal/g)). Incidentally alcohol has 7Cal/g. This is a very effective and (as any human can attest to) successful way of making sure of survival.

Also explains why all other animals like "human" food. They have the same basic needs, therefore preferences.

Now this was quite a success story in the pre-historic times, but nowadays it is becoming a survival-impeding trait. If you statisfy all of the preferences you will have a) diabetes b) generous extra weight c) heart troubles d) die early.

If evolution could keep up with these food-industrial changes, we will have humans that will no longer seek out these foods. Can you imaging not liking a good chocolate or Big Mac? Our descendents will likely to (or should) dislike these.

So it boils down to timeframe. Unfortunately evolution works on the 100K-1G year time frame, while industrial food production happened in the last 100-200 years. Quite a different scale.

This could be a case for genetic engineering, to nudge evolution along the way a little faster. Too short of a time frame can make the natural selection to fail, however. Computer simulations maybe?

This is an offical(R)(TM) test(R)(TM).