good content still attrackts audiences

the entertainment industry has been on a rampage the last couple of years blaming everything on the internet, content copying, and customers, oh well and of course the ipod. first it was only the music industry, then with increasing availability of movies online the movie industry also blamed weak ticket sales in the last couple of years on the internet and the bad customers making illegal copies of movies and not watching them in theaters where they have to pay. this resulted in some quite stupid and ridiculous ads trying to make people feel bad for watching “illegal” copies of movies, and how they are hurting the movie industry.

well today ticket sales numbers came and ‘X-Men’ Scores Record Holiday Opening. i haven’t seen the movie and i don’t know if it is a great movie, but it brought in more than $120 million over the weekend. and the da vinci code brought in $45 million in its second week.

this has put ticket sales this year six percent ahead of last years and movie executive are happy “”I think this puts to bed the notion that people don’t want to go to movies anymore,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations. … “The combination of ‘Da Vinci Code’ and ‘X-Men’ proves that people really love to go to the movies, especially in the summer.”"

so i maybe it wasn’t those bad consumers after all? maybe it was just crappy content that no one wanted to watch that caused low revenues for movie studios, and maybe they should redo those ads and make little ads aimed at studio bosses that tell them that shitty content puts jobs in the movie industry at risk and that they should focus on making good and interesting movies that will draw audiences into the theaters rather than constantly blaming and fighting their customers.

o’reilly blames daily show for uninformed americans

media matters has a piece on a recent o’reilly rant about the state of american culture, and in his typical biased fashion he rambles that Young Americans “have no idea what’s going on” because they “get their news from Jon Stewart”. for a complete visual enjoyment of his stupidity media matters has a video of the show next to the article. while o’reilly blames pop-culture, stars, and the ever present liberal media for the decline in general knowledge of current affairs and basic knowledge he does not talk about the impact of shows like his own on broadening its viewers horizons. after all he is the one “journalist” who didn’t even take an all expenses trip to darfur by the nyt’s nicholas kristof because he can’t leave his desk in ny to actually learn about the stories he is so opinionated about.

instead he blames “… the left-wing ladies [ Dixie Chicks]” for reaching “… some younger Americans. And the media eagerly embraces what they and other committed lefty entertainers have to say. But you won’t be hearing too much about Ted Nugent’s opinions.”
yes, there is so much those young americans could learn from mr nugent, like killing wild animals with bows and arrows or how important it is to have enough weapons at home to outfit a whole army…no this is way more important than actually thinking about questions that the dixie chicks raise like should we be fighting this war in iraq? or is this country on the right track? … it might be that those oh so liberal media just have nothing of substance to report about right wings nuts like nugent or for that matter o’reilly.

and so o’reilly goes on: “Many Americans ages 18 to 24 have no idea what’s going on. … Thus, we have millions of Americans who get their news from Jon Stewart and their point of view from bomb-throwing entertainers”

the problems is that unfortunately this is true, and it is not something that john stewart should be ashamed of but news stations like fox news and mr o’reilly’s very own show because they are bested by a comedy show in reporting what is actually happening in this world. o’reilly is right that many get their news from the daily show, but those are actually not those 18 to 24 year old that are uninformed, the ones that are uninformed are the ones that watch fox propaganda or nothing at all. and on top of this he makes it sound like the problem of current affairs and general knowledge (or more the lack of it) here in america is a problem of only the 18 to 24 year olds, well just ask a group of 50 to 60 year old americans to show iraq on a map and the results are probably pretty much the same.

the egg came first

no more asking what came first, chicken or egg … its the egg that came first. at least according to the british according to this story in the guardian: Chicken and egg question answered

in case you can’t wait to read it …

“”Whether chicken eggs preceded chickens hinges on the nature of chicken eggs,” said panel member and philosopher of science David Papineau at King’s College London.

“I would argue it’s a chicken egg if it has a chicken in it. If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg. By this reasoning, the first chicken did indeed come from a chicken egg, even though that egg didn’t come from chickens.”"

so there you have it the egg was first …

the new look of the web

there is a lot of talk about web 2.0, ajax, social sites … but all along, i think that there has been a big shift in web site design. take a look at some recent sites

http://spotback.com/
http://corkd.com/
http://www.uncrate.com/

i think they have all become easier to read, and with this i don’t mean the language by the font, font size, and just visual clarity. also i think that blogs have had quite some impact even on non blog sites. uncrate is kind of like a blog, but then it isn’t. corkd is not a blog, but even though if you look at the site design, spacing and structure there are quite a few blog elements in it. the same can be said about spotback, which again is not really a blog, but could easily be mistaken for one.

what is interesting that these non-blog blog sites make it really easy to read content and identify and follow the structure, but if you look at heavy content sites that have been recently redesigned, like the following ones

http://www.nytimes.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://news.com

they are getting more crammed with content, making it actually harder to read content and to find it. these sites are so packed with content that it is hard to actually see it.

while all the talk about a new internet boom is boring, this development in web design is really exciting, especially since it is driven by small site, innovators that were quite for some time, but might be taking back the web now from the gray and boring corporate sites.

strangest pepsi ad ever

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1055798137866078898
great ad, i love it

it is now official, the nsa is above the law

wired/ap report that the DOJ Drops Wiretap Investigation

the reason for the doj dropping the case is just mind-boggling:
“”We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR [The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility] has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,” OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey’s office shared the letter with The Associated Press.”

the article goes on saying:

“Jarrett wrote that beginning in January his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

“Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,” Jarrett wrote.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program “has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception.”"

to assume that the oversight is doing its job is to say congress is doing its job and it is pretty obvious that that is not the case. so an investigation into the wiretaps is critical. but there are no more checks and balances in this government. congress, the check to the president, has surrendered to bush, and now the justice department has surrendered to the intelligence apparatus.

i guess a question that people have to start asking is how is the current system that much different from a dictatorship or weimar? do the people still run this country as it should be in a democracy? is there still enough pressure on those in power to do the best for the country? and most of all can a democracy survive when large parts of the government do not have to provide any accountability for what they do?

real’s rob glaser says i am stealing music

in this conversation with uk’s guardian rob glaser (ceo of real networks) said:

“If you want interoperable music today, there is a very easy solution: it’s called stealing. The average number of songs sold for the iPod is 25, and there are many more songs on iPods than 25. About half the music on iPods is music obtained illegitimately either from an illegal peer-to-peer networks or from ripping friends’ CDs, which is illegal.”

well, i have a bit more than 3700 songs on my ipod, so i guess he is implying that i obtained 3675 of them illegally? well rob, feel free to drop by and take a look at my ipod and my music collection, they are all legally obtained. i guess rob thinks that people start at zero when they switch to digital music, but rob, i am 34, i have been buying music since i was about 10. ok i didn’t rip my vinyl, but quite a few of the 800 cds that i bought over the years.

this stupid math of people like rob and other music execs is really pissing me off. just because they are too dumb to get online music they have to blame customers … well how about blaming your crappy software next time?

taking back christianity

time has a great column by andrew sullivan on how the right is taking over religion and the problem non-republican christians have as a result of it. My Problem with Christianism– A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda

i especially like and agree with him saying:
“And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God’s real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo?”

“…Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one’s beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.”

i think christians who do not feel welcome or part of this right wing tent not only in the US have to get back to the socially focused christianity that was responsible for the civil right and peace movement of the 60s and 70s. there has to be a move back to the christian messages of love, peace and fighting poverty (topics that do good and are inclusive), rather than exclusive topics like anti-gay marriage and abortion.

some common sense could have saved a lot of money

a couple of sites are linking to the story of how the airline America West has been using Computer simulations to produce superior airplane-loading systems. here is a piece of the boingboing story:

“Airlines have employed computer simulations to come up with a variety of counterintuitive super-efficient ways of boarding airplanes, with names like “Reverse Pyramid” and “WilMA.” These systems promise to reduce turn-around significantly.”

the “reverse pyramid” means nothing more than that the fastest way to get a plane to load the passengers is from the back to the front (if the door is in the front) and also from the outside in (meaning windows, middle, aisle). ok, i am all in favor of computer models for complex and complicated things (like weather, moon landings, crash tests …) but this is a bit of a joke isn’t it? this is just common sense, i bet asking a five year old would have lead to the same outcome. plus in the time before miles craziness, airlines (at least in europe) did board this way, but then i guess gold card members demanded higher privileges and messing up the whole boarding process. so while technology can certainly do a lot of good, sometime people should use their brain first. ok i admit that the graphics are kind of nice, but do you need a research study for that?

nine thoughts on the current immigration debate

last monday, may first, there were demonstrations all across the US. to be honest i still don’t really understand what the demonstrations where about. i have two interpretations. one, that they were about making illegal immigrants legal and not to deport them. two, that they were about a reformation about the american immigration laws. the first interpretation seems to me a bit more true than the second since if this was in general about immigration laws, why where 90 to 95% of the demonstrators mexican or latin american (probably the largest group of illegal immigrants)? now, i am an immigrant myself. a legal one. i have a green card i got. it took quite some time to get it, and it wasn’t easy. so here are my thoughts on the current immigration debate:

1. immigration is good, not only for the US but for any country. but immigration has to be managed, because otherwise why have borders? i guess some people might argue that everyone has the right to live everywhere on this earth, but that is just not the case. and i doubt it would help, after all the rich western nations can only support so many people in their current structures with healthcare and other benefits. so i guess this means countries will have borders and will keep managing the inflow of immigrants.
2. there is this view that some of the illegal immigrants are really smart and they should get a chance. well, i have no doubt that a lot of them are smart, but does that mean that all smart people should be able to move here?
3. the problem with the current debate i think is that it is so focused on mexican and latin american immigrants. which i think is wrong. this should be a debate about illegal immigrants and immigrants. and i think the demonstrations are partly to blame for making this about latin american immigrants only.
4. i don’t think that illegal immigrants should receive any benefits. why? well because it is illegal. i don’t think any group of law breakers has ever gone and demonstrated to fight for more rights. and neither should they. it can be up for discussion if a law makes sense but if everybody agrees that it does then it also should be enacted. and i think having a law that makes certain kinds of immigrations illegal does make sense.
5. i don’t think that deportation is the solution to the problem of immigration. i think the solution has to be an economic one. the companies that hire illegal immigrants have to be punished so that they don’t hire any illegal immigrants anymore.
6. immigration to me has two important components. first, it helps to increase the number of smart people to increase innovation. second, help those in dire need and i am speaking here of political asylum seekers. economic need to me is not a main component, there should be a contingent of immigration spots for those but that should be fairly small and randomly provided.
7. while i think a country should not require a standard culture, i think that what is already happening in some parts of the US is not good, and that is creating sub-cultures. english should be the main language and immigrants should be expected to learn it and use it. there is no need for a spanish or chinese version of the national anthem.
8. is immigration fair? no, it isn’t, but there are many things on this planet that are not fair. and i don’t think that by changing immigration alone things will get all better. especially, again, since the debate only focused on mexican and latin american immigration. if this would be about fairness america would have to let in people from all over the world. the problem is that they can usually not just climb a fence, they have to get here by plane or ship.
9. are these demonstrations comparable to the civil rights movement of the 60s? no, i don’t think so. the civil rights movement was about basic human rights, treating people the same. here we are speaking about people who broke the law. and the law is by far not against human rights. it is a basic law used by pretty much every nation on this planet.

there is probably much more to this topic, but these are the main thoughts that i had when i saw the pictures of the demonstrations on tv last week.

these thoughts might upset some people but i hope not.