This was so strange I had to post it. Watch as this guy sings about bittorrent.
Every addiction has behind it a network of people waiting to profit from it.
Few people will deny the grip that big oil has on America is crippling our societies. Decades of dependency have fueled a system that has enslaved us to the manufacturers of petroleum. In the year where Exxon posted its largest ever annual profit, the Western world nervously watched to see if gas prices might hit $3 a gallon.
It hasn’t always been like this. But when the automobile revolutionized the way we traveled long distances our dependency was born. Almost a century later, now that automobiles have become our motorized wheelchairs for a trip across the street to the store, it’s no wonder that users of that technology are at the mercy of Big Oil corporations, whose heads have developed an image of little more than fat cat crack peddlers. Oil has become an addiction so strong its keepers can start wars of near-global proportion by a simple change in policy.
And in the past 10 years we’ve been presented with a new technology that has had as big of an impact as the invention of the automobile has. The internet and our growing addictions to the content it delivers are increasing exponentially every year: movies, music, VoIP. The list of deliverables will continue to grow into the horizon.
And the controllers of this technology, the ones who mainline it into our homes, have over the past 10 years started to realize that they too can have the same power as Big Oil. Our addictions are similar, and so can the control over it be.
Internet providers like AT&T and BellSouth have recently said they want to see high-volume Web services (Google, Skype, Yahoo!, etc) pay a premium for their current position on the Web. Any company that doesn’t pay the premium will have their traffic slow exponentially. Such a system, critics argue, will drastically reduce the open nature of the Web by squashing smaller Web services. The biggie sites would likely have to pass costs off onto users.
Imagine paying for each Google search? Or subscribing to the front page of CNN or Yahoo?
If the open nature of the Internet was controlled with the same big-business gusto and squandering of corporate ethics that Big Oil has engaged in, I think we can all expect a massive shift in the digital landscape that we know today.
You might have heard people talking about Blu-Ray.
There’s good reason. Remember about eight years ago when you heard people mumbling about new contraptions called DVDs? Well, some geeky types think Blu-Ray will be the next new thing just like DVDs were back then. In fact, it’s just like DVD – but instead of standard definition movies you’ll be able to play high definition movies (if you have a high-def television).
It’s also kind of like the CDs you use with your computers. Odds are if you have a CD burner you can burn about 750MB of data to a standard disc.
With Blu-Ray technology you can burn between 25 – 50 gigabytes of data. Now thats a lot of data.
But what is Blu-Ray?
Blu-ray Disc (BD) is a next-generation optical disc format meant for storage of high-definition video and high-density data. The Blu-ray standard was jointly developed by a group of consumer electronics and PC companies called the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). As compared to the HD DVD format, its main competitor, Blu-ray has more information capacity per layer, 25 instead of 15 gigabytes, but may initially be more expensive to produce.
Blu-ray gets its name from the shorter wavelength (405 nm) of a “blue” (technically blue-violet) laser that allows it to store substantially more data than a DVD, which has the same physical dimensions but uses a longer wavelength (650 nm) red laser.
It likely will be a couple years before you have to worry about Blu-Ray discs making your current DVD collection obsolete. But now would be a good time to start thinking twice about buying any new boxsets – especially if you own or are considering owning a high-def television.
Atari 2600:
Newsclip of 1984 gaming convention:
Because your schooldesk will protect you from nuclear fallout:
From the AP:
The Interior Department disclosed Wednesday that a provision was mysteriously deleted from hundreds of federal drilling leases in the late 1990s that would have required producers to pay royalties, once prices reached a certain level, on oil or gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
…
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the subcommittee chairman, called the whole matter “suspicious.”
“This is a $7 billion word processing error,” Issa told reporters. He said some of the leases issued during those two years could remain in effect for as long as 85 years, so the government will be unable to collect royalty payments from oil and gas taken from those leases for decades to come.
Michael Castellon 