doug “the dumb-butt” morris strikes again … this time aiming for ipod royalties

reuters posted a story today that confirms that doug “the dumb-butt” morris (the universal music ceo) is going to try to get royalties from apple for every ipod (Universal Music may seek royalty deal with iPod)

Universal Music Group Chief Executive Doug Morris said on Tuesday he may try to fashion an iPod royalty fee with Apple Computer Inc. in the next round of negotiations in early 2007.

i guess his argument is:

“It would be a nice idea. We have a negotiation coming up not too far. I don’t see why we wouldn’t do that…”

well yes, a nice idea if you are universal. but what about the consumer, the people who pay for ipods and for music? is it a good idea for them? no, because they are the ones who are paying for it, and they are the ones that will pay twice, three time …

and pay for what? royalties for what exactly mr morris? what if i am an IT guy using my ipod as an external hard-drive to update other computers? what if i am a photographer and use it to store pictures? what if i like to listen to podcasts? or what if i am a musician and store my songs on it? or what if i am a consumer and pay for music i download at the itunes store or buy a cd and then store it on my ipod? why would i have to pay royalties again? don’t i pay them when i purchase a song? if not please let me know. and if so, please let me know why i have to pay twice? and please don’t tell me that all ipod owners are thiefs, because that is just crap (and you know it).

safari shortcut … bookmarks bar menu quick access

i don’t know how known this shortcut is, but i just accidentally stumbled across it. if you use the safari web browser and have bookmarks in the bookmarks bar menu then you can directly select them by clicking apple + number … well if you have 10 bookmarks in the bookmarks bar menu then you can give them numbers from 1 to 10 starting at the left … and apple + 2 would be lead to safari loading the second bookmark from the left in your bookmarks bar menu.

stumbled across this when trying to hit apple-tab …

if there is no trust in the justice system, why don’t we get rid of it and replace it withe a punish system instead?

dealing with sex offenders seems to be one of the few issues where nearly all americans can agree on. there are no public outcries when databases are made public in which anybody can search for the nearest sex offender and get an address, name and picture. this is actually demanded by the public. and according to the new york times article Zoning Laws That Bar Pedophiles Raise Concerns more and more communities are demanding that sex offenders and in particular pedophiles are being banned from areas in their communities. these restrictions include the following state laws:

More than 20 states have broad laws keeping sex offenders from schools, churches, playgrounds and the like.

in some places, the article writes, the effect of the laws can make whole towns inhabitable for sex offenders:

On Tuesday the City Council in Jersey City enacted an ordinance that prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of a school, park, sports facility, theater or convenience store, among other places. The measure exempts offenders who already have established residence in such zones, but bars newly released convicts who want to return home or move in with relatives. Taken together, the zones block out virtually the whole city.

the results of these laws are:

Professionals who treat sex offenders say those who are forced to move often drop out of treatment programs. Civil liberties advocates say the restrictions unfairly punish people who have already served their sentences. But perhaps the most potent complaint about the ordinances is one articulated in A. B.’s lawsuit: that they impede the state’s ability to track the offenders in the first place.
…
In Florida, which has 1,000-foot buffer zones, a survey of 135 offenders showed that about half had to move after the law was adopted.

to me this has little to do with a working justice system, but rather with a revenge system and is trying to solve real problems with publicity stunts. will these buffer zones stop sex offenders? probably not. and most of all it shows that as a society we have lost any idea of what we want from our justice system. it seems that we want a system that punishes criminals in an act of revenge.

but to me a justice system is not about revenge for the individual and it means more than bringing offenders and criminals to justice. to me the justice system includes three things:
1. the investigation of crimes and the identification of the offenders
2. the due-process and the adequate sentencing
3. the re-integration into society after sentencing has been served

by no means do i want to belittle the crimes that sex offenders have committed, more than most other crimes they leave their victims mentally scarred for life. but i think that society has to make a choice. and that is either agree on saying that sex offenders are not treatable (and this should happen based on scientific evidence and not just popular believe) and the chances of committing another crime are quite close to 100% and therefore sex offenders need to receive life sentences without parole, to ensure that they can not commit another crime. or, society needs to agree that once a sex offender is released from prison (and the prison should not just be a prison, but a place which is used to re-socialize its inmates, rather than anti-socilize its inmates as it happens right now) the person is re-integrated into society as a full member of society with all rights and all duties. there can certainly be a time of parole in which a sex offender just like any other criminal will have to prove to society that they have adjusted to society and are re-integrated, but once that time is over, and even during that time, the person should have the same rights and duties as any other member of society. while i can understand that especially people which have been victims of sex offenders will find this a horrible idea, it is probably fairly similar to families that lost a member of their family through murder and will at one point see the murderer be released from prison.

i think we have to ask ourselves why do we treat sex offenders different from other criminals? why do we not have lists for other criminals, like pick-pockets or coke dealers?

a justice system does not solve all criminal activities from happening, society will always have to live with a certain level or risk. some risks we accept in exchange for personal liberties, other risks we might have to accept in order to have a justice system in the first place, or otherwise we might as well go back in time and adopt the practice of lynch mobs.

the right is having a hard time understanding fake news … that comes as a bit of a shocker to me

newbusters a right wing blog that says it is exposing and combating liberal media bias is writing about the colbert report in their piece Colbert Mocks Limbaugh’s Addiction, Compares Him to Manson, Franken Thrusts Pelvis. in the story they say

The November 15 edition of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central offered more proof of comedian Stephen Colbert’s ineffective charade at pretending to be a conservative.

well, all i can say is that looking at the more than 90 comments the story got colbert can’t be this ineffective. especially if you read some of the responses, such as:

Having never watched “Colbert,” since his act on Comedy Central was an obvious “send-up” of “conservative thought” from the beginning, I can’t say I’m surprised at all. And, just as with Jon Stewart, if objections are raised, it will be dismissed as “just entertainment.” Yes, but “entertainment” with an agenda.

To be really fair and entertaining, Colbert should be as “real” a conservative as Stewart is a “real” liberal. Or vice-versa. Satire DOES cut both ways, you know, ComCent.

i don’t know if they understand comedy, but if colbert would play a “real” fake conservative then it wouldn’t be fun anymore … maybe they should ask fox to be “real” fair and balanced … then colbert and stewart would have a harder time to be real fake.

the other comment i liked was this one:

The sad thing is I have several college educated liberal friends who think that the Daily Show is good for news. They think that it is REAL news with jokes. They dont realize that they make up most of this stuff out of whole cloth. This is what the left has to do, they have to make up news to keep their consitutents uninformed. The left fears the informed voter.

oh, we don’t get that some of the segments are made up… well, i think nobody told them that fox sells made up news as real news … and they are buying it.

the slow move to a new two-class society

cities have always attracted broad numbers of country folks who are trying to improve their economic life. in third world countries this is leading to mega-cities with huge shanty towns and slums, and resulting in little economic improvements, and instead often to increased crime.

in developed countries, especially the US, the economic book between the ’50s and ’80s seems to have reversed this trend and led to a move away from the city. cars made commutes easy, and business parks move office jobs away from traffic grid lock in the cities. the result were office parks, malls, and urban sprawl. and cities with increasing crime problems and increasing poverty. but it seems that this anti-urban society has also led to an intellectual backlash (one could maybe say that the increasing conservative movement is a result of the suburbanation of the US). there seems to be something about smart people though and that is that they rather hang around other smart people than in their cookie-cutter houses. the ’90s had a couple of interesting developments (partly driven by more innovative urban planners). cities cleaned up their crime ridden inner cities, more and more knowledge workers were needed, starbucks created places were people could actually sit and hang out instead of being thrown out off once the coffee or drink was purchased, new developments allowed for a less car centric living (living and working space convergence). with the already higher number of intellectual people living in cities (partly because cities are usually media and education hubs), and an increase in the so called knowledge economy (also fueled by the internet boom) people (especially young and smart ones) moved back to the cities, resulting in increasing rents, better restaurants, new jobs, new developments …

at the same time this move into the cities by this knowledge-worker and creative class lead to an interesting political development. cities became much more liberal (in the US that means democratic). while for a long time the south was the main source of democratic votes, cities are now the sure votes for the democrats. while not every city is a washington dc with more than 90% of voters voting democrat, i read that in the last presidential election every city with a population of more than 500,000 voted for kerry. i admit that not all of those votes are by the intellectual group, or that intellectuals are necessarily smarter, or that smart people vote for democrats, there seems to be a connection now between increasing intellectual groups at least and them voting for democrats. if you take a look at virginia for example it is the north of the state that voted democrat and that is the more affluent part of the state and the part with a higher number of DC based knowledge workers.

what triggered this writing is something i read earlier on pandagon … Potemkin thriving downtown scenes. and i agree with:

Basically, young creative people don’t want to live where they’re bored, unappreciated, and don’t have good socializing opportunities or job prospects. Duh. And so what people who fit into this demographic do is up and move—from Podunk, Anywhere to Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, New York, San Francisco. And those cities benefit while other cities lose out. The phenomenon is so common at this point that it’s probably startling to think of it as a phenomenon. I live in one of the magnet cities and am of roughly that group of people now, and I can safely say that nearly everyone you’ll meet is from somewhere else, and the liberals-from-Republican-Shitsville demographic is the dominate one here. People turn down nice jobs elsewhere to live here. People have broken engagements rather than leave Austin.

and they also posted this graphic which illustrates how intelligence attracts intelligence … and cities seem to be the best places for intelligence to breed and develop (because most of the dark spots on the map are right on top of large metropolitan areas).

this made me think of a story the new york times ran last week: Cities Compete in Hipness Battle to Attract Young. and it is no longer just enough to be a city, but among cities there is now a fight of who is the coolest city. while the story shows that cities like atlanta and las vegas are attracting more young people while cities like los angeles and new york are losing some i think that this is easily made up in those cities by people wanting to go there. there is on the one side certainly an increasing coolness of cities like atlanta, but then other cities, such as new york, are also becoming too expensive (probably much more of a concern for those cities, because this will not allow other less well off smart people live in those cities). but the interesting part is that now it is about movement between cities, and not so much about attracting people from the countryside.

what does this mean for the US? well cities will be the base of the democrats and they will house the knowledge economy (which is probably one of the faster growing ones). the country side will loose even more interesting people and will have to rely on small town colleges and university to attract intellectuals.

a question of style

i write a lot about politics, probably most of this blog is about politics. and then there is a lot of tech stuff, mostly gadgets and apple things. there are a couple of other interests that i have. one of them is fashion (as strangely as this might sound). i accept that everyone has their own style and favorites. but there are just some things that i can’t understand. and they seem to be US things. and countries seem to have their quirks, when i lived in amsterdam, women used to wear tight skirts over jeans or other pants … which just looks ugly. pretty much as ugly as women here in the US wearing ugg boots with mini-skirts and bare legs (who thought of that? and who thinks that actually looks good?).

well, what i actually wanted to rant about is something that men seem to like here in the US. first of all it is hanging all kinds of gadgets on their belt. don’t know if this is some sort of porsche replacement (”i have more things on my belt than you”) but having gadgets hanging off your belt is just plain wrong. hold the phone in your hands or put it in a jacket pocket.

the second thing is actually closely related and this is having a bluetooth headset attached to the ear, even if not in use. there seems to be a trend … men in the US want to show off their gadgets and since the bluetooth headset doesn’t have a belt holster, why not keep it on the ear. it is especially cool when the blue light starts blinking and everyone can see you are actually receiving a call (not to mention that the ringtone on the phone is probably set to the highest level with the most annoying ringtone). with some of these people i sometimes worry that they might have glued the headset to their ear and can’t get it off. i guess it is laziness to take it off, but then i would turn nuts having this thing hang off my ear all day.

so my two asks are: no gadgets on belts and not gadgets hanging off ears (unless in use)

just a little update on the bluetooth headset thing …
on the cover of this morning’s new york times is this picture

this is a picture of a group of people with mayor bloomberg in new york and the guy on the left in the picture (red circle) is meeting the mayor and is having a bluetooth headset on his ear. this is not just a question of style, but etiquette, and also not just a question of who you meet, if you meet someone you need to take out a headset, just as you would stop talking.

what if society is wrong about homosexuality?

while it is obvious how religion loses its authority for being wrong about homosexuality. but the PBS Frontline program a hidden life tells the story of the republican mayor jim west of spokane, washington. in a way like haggard’s story and probably the story of many homosexual men and women, west’s consists of lies and a shadow life. in west’s story it also seemed to have included illegal behavior.

what if religion is wrong about homosexuality?

in 1991 i did my second trip to the US. i had just finished high-school and started a four month stay in the US during which i would be a camp counselor in ohio. to train us european counselors to be on how to be a councelor most of us were flown to new york where we spent two days on the columbia university campus. in the first meeting a member of the university staff showed us around campus and told us what to do and what not to do in early ’90s new york. then he gave a stat that despite all the bad news about new york the campus was really save. the stat was from usa today and he quickly added that he didn’t actually read the paper, because it was not worthy to ready, on par with the Sun in the UK or Bild in germany. well ever since i shunned the paper, merely looking at the front page when i was in front of my hotel room door.

so i was quite surprised when i found a link on scienceblogs(Abominations: Homosexuality, Football? quoting a usa today article, which was called When religion loses its credibility. the piece is written by oliver thomas, a Baptist minister. and it has a very interesting assumption

What if Christian leaders are wrong about homosexuality?

i guess one could ask, why is this important, and thomas gives the answer to that right away

Religion’s only real commodity, after all, is its moral authority. Lose that, and we lose our credibility. Lose credibility, and we might as well close up shop.

interestingly this links directly to the economist’s the world in 2007 which includes one article about the global challenge of institutions loosing their moral authority (including UN, the EU, the US, but also the global religions) and the power vacuum this will provide.

thomas compares religion’s view on homosexuality to its view on planets and their loosing battle with galileo and science, making the point that

Scientific facts, after all, are a stubborn thing.

and that as it becomes more and more clear that homosexuality is not a choice but something people are born with, something which can not be preached against.

he then goes on about how selective interpretation of bible passages does not make a lot of sense, dissecting the hypocrisy of the religious right in quoting just one little passage of leviticus, while ignoring most of the rest.

The truth is that mainstream religion has moved beyond animal sacrifice, slavery and the host of primitive rituals described in Leviticus centuries ago. Selectively hanging onto these ancient proscriptions for gays and lesbians exclusively is unfair according to anybody’s standard of ethics. We lawyers call it “selective enforcement,” and in civil affairs it’s illegal.

he then goes on in quoting other passages of the bible that question these anti-homosexual interpretations of the bible

A better reading of Scripture starts with the book of Genesis and the grand pronouncement about the world God created and all those who dwelled in it. “And, the Lord saw that it was good.” If God created us and if everything he created is good, how can a gay person be guilty of being anything more than what God created him or her to be?

and also points out that in jesus’s teachings homosexuality is completely absent.

overall a very refreshing read. i think the key problem is that the religious right has this idea of a bible that does not require interpretation, something which just is not possible. after all the different books of the bible were written by humans, during specific times, and have since been translated into many languages during different times, to think that there is one interpretation of the bible as it is written today is just plain wrong. if i see people like haggard and the like hold a modern day bible in their hand claiming that this is the one truth i just have to wonder if he ever read the original transcripts of the bible and compared it with the book he holds in his hands because the translation already is an interpretation.

what is the forecast for 2007? — grim, judging by the economist’s world in 2007

i always look forward to this time of year because it is during those last two months of the year that the economist publishes their forecast for the coming year … the world in …, well in 2007. in the past that publication always struck me as overly optimistic, even during the economic downturn and after 9/11.

but when i finally took the world in 2007 out of my briefcase and looked at the cover, the all black cover, i thought, wow, this is more like an obituary, than an optimistic publication. i stared at the cover for a while and on top of the shiny black there was bush, a bullet hole ridden wall, screaming muslims, and merkel. judging by the cover i thought, wow, this 2007 actually going to turn sour?

then after reading the introduction from daniel franklin, the editor of the world in 2007, i realized that this is one of the few times that i remember the, that the publication is actually sounding quite pessimistic about the coming year. the article on teh publication’s page nine starts with uncertainty caused by changes in leadership in the UK, france, the united nations, and also in the US through a change in leadership in congress. while change is not necessarily bad i guess the economist doesn’t know what to make of the uncertainty.

key agenda items of world leaders are also not necessarily optimistic (climate change and global warming, changes in global power structure, a so called midlife crisis of the european union). reason for the pessimism is that progress

“is made more difficult by the diminishing authority of the sole superpower, the United States …”

and when it comes to the advance of democracy and its positive impact on societies that adopt it, the publication says

“But even here [the advance of democracy] things have stalled. Our new rating of democracy around the world suggests that in 2007 more countries will slide backwards than will move ahead.”

while the article ends with an optimistic note, i find these areas of progress a bit shallow “the internet will keep transforming business in ways that delight consumers”, “even the European Union … will expand to embrace two more ex-communist countries …”

i guess similar to the last couple of years global terrorism has kept the world in a constant state of angst resulting in conservative business investments and global consumer spending (with the exception of the US). at the same time the war in iraq and other US policies have undermined the countries moral authority (as the economist points out) and its ability to actually do things (like help dafour). but despite those realities business grew, unemployment went down and so far there weren’t any additional 9/11s. so why should 2007 be any different from the past years? i don’t know and i don’t think that the uncertainty through power changes will make a difference, and the agenda items will not be solved, and politicians will not necessarily push them ahead, but over time even politicians will not be able to ignore them and countries will get together to solve them.

so yes, i agree in the end with the outlook:

“a year that sees … the 50th anniversary of the pina colada can’t be all bad.”

something for my christmas wish-list — a jet powered fire estinguisher

i found this over at gizmodo. this must be one of the coolest inventions of the year. paid that with german commentary … and you have an oscar contender…