Sean’s Mental Walkabout

A new rate and rules change is being pushed down by the RIAA at the moment, which will mean that most internet radio stations will be kicked off the air. Stations like RadioParadise would be required to pay 125% of their annual budget just to come up with the fees required to pay for their current subscriber base.

More information here.

If you listen to internet radio, consider writing congress on this, otherwise you may loose one of the great new inventions of the internet.

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Apparently when Viacom issued their statement of 100,000 videos on youtube infringing their copyright, they didn’t really bother to look at many of them to verify that. There was a youtube video based on “Re: Your Brains”, a Jonathan Coulton song licensed under CC, that also got pulled:

Yeah, Viacom issued a massive takedown notice to YouTube, and a bunch of user-created content got caught in the crossfire. It seems like they just did a rough search on Viacom property names, and compiled the ENTIRE results into their takedown. So there was probably nothing in Spiff’s video that violated YouTube’s ToU, but some comment or tag that referenced a Viacom property to make it show up in the legal team’s search.

More details on the unfolding story on Jonathan’s blog.

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On the way back from Vermont, On the Media had a very good story on the reporting around the Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing fiasco in Boston. What is most interesting is how much CNN and all the other cable news media whipped up a storm around the “bomb like devices” for hours before any real information was in, and how CNN (owned by the same parent company as Cartoon Network) appeared to be the first to break the news that these things weren’t bombs after all, but just LED light boards.

The amount of freak out that occurred around a set of 6 LED light boards is truly amazing. I guess we did get our own War of the Worlds afterall, which no one believed could happen again. I wonder if the sense of humor around the incident back in Orson Wells day was as lacking as it appears to be today.

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Listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning, and there was an interview with Jonathan Coulton who wrote and performed the song Code Monkey as part of his Thing-a-week blog this past year. had brought up Code Monkey during the past couple of weeks, and I hadn’t gotten around to finding it yet.

If you are a software person, listen to the song. It will make you crack a smile, if not laugh out loud. Jonathan Coulton also has other songs which I would link here, except it appears that his site has been cratered temporarily by the NPR story. Hopefully it will be back soon.

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I think has the best set of references here. It’s been a week of weirdness elsewhere as well, so I guess doom does just come in torrents.

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This article on the myth of the million dollar space pen is really quite good.

The short: NASA never spent a million dollars to build a pen, read the article for the whole story.

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In the near future, media will be revolutionized by the introduction of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the successors of the DVD. These two will be able to carry movies in much higher resolutions, dramatically improving image quality on your HDTV or monitor. This is what we all know. What most of us don’t know is that it’s going to cost you thousands of dollars extra to actually be able to enjoy these high definition movies!

Interested? Want to prevent this from happening? Enter the world of DRM Madness!

Sign the petition on http://www.drmadness.com/index.php. Will an internet petition help… maybe not. But maybe if enough people realize how they are about to get bent over by the media industry, they’ll reconsider dropping a couple of Gs on new HD equipment.

Vote with your wallet, don’t buy HD!

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From a wired blog post:

The federal government intends to invoke the rarely used “State Secrets Privilege” — the legal equivalent of a nuclear bomb — in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class action lawsuit against AT&T that alleges the telecom collaborated with the government’s secret spying on American citizens.

The State Secrets Privilege is a vestige from English common law that lets the executive branch step into a civil lawsuit and have it dismissed if the case might reveal information that puts national security at risk.

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Just read this article at Ars Technical:

Consumer advocates cheered as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer took music labels to task last year for allegedly bribing radio stations to play certain artists. The resulting payola scandal managed to dig up incriminating evidence against a host of radio stations and labels, but it hasn’t yet opened the airwaves to more diverse music. In fact, the opposite has happened; radio today is more homogenous than it was a year ago.

The article goes on to say that people are afraid to play non top 40 songs because they may get investigated for going and doing anything unusual.

Grrrr if you had more than a 15 song play list to begin with, sticking in Cake’s Mahna Mahna wouldn’t be suspicious, it would be part of being a useful DJ, instead of a cog in some machine.

For all these reasons I gave up on comercial radio about 6 years ago. In the last year I was introduced to Radio Paradise, a listener supported, online radio station, that has a really good and broad mix of music. Because they are listener supported, there are no comercials, so in a 1 hour block you get 59.5 minutes of music, and .5 minutes of station identification, and “buy our stuff” so the station can stay online.

Before a trip to Vermont, I did about a day of stream capture of Radio Paradise, so that I’d have good music to listen to on the road. Given this representative data set, I decided I’d try to get some ideas about the play list of RP. In this block of time they played 324 songs. There were no repeated songs. The maximum number of songs played by a single artist was 5, the artist being Jonny Cash. It happened to be the week the Jonny Cash movie was coming out, so I’m assuming they had a few requests for that as well. That’s what I call diverse radio, with a useful DJ running it.

I love you Radio Paradise! Especially when you play Cake’s Mahna Mahna.

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