Category: Uncategorized

HEATHER NEWMAN: Recording industry has warning: File-sharers have to face the music

I’m sure by now you’ve heard about the kids that got “busted” by the RIAA for using Kazaa. But this caught my eye:

The damages sought by the suits are astronomical: $150,000 per song, the maximum allowed by law. Multiply that by the 652,000 or so songs the RIAA alleges student Joseph Nievelt offered to other Michigan Tech students on his service, and the scope of the suit is clear.

That total? About $97.8 trillion — yes, trillion with a T — or enough money to buy every CD sold in America last year over again for the next 120,000 years, according to RIAA statistics. And that’s just Nievelt’s case.

Now, at first I thought, 652000 songs by an average of 3 megs a song, that’s just shy of 2 terabytes. What sort of kid has two terabytes?

But then Brett mentioned that it was probably the number of times he sent a file to someone.

So that means that downloading a file over the internet carries a price tag of $150,000. By visitng my web page – which has just a graphic, a javascript include, and the html – that’s $450,000.

Searching Google Images gives you 20 thumbnails back, plus various extra google graphics (we’ll say 4), plus the HTML – why, that’s 3.75 million dollars.

Why didn’t anyone tell me the internet was so expensive?

New clothes stab bugs with molecular daggers

Tiny molecular daggers that latch onto fibres stab and destroy microbes have been created, meaning “killer clothes” may soon be available. Anti-fungal socks could take on athlete’s foot while, on a more serious note, military uniforms could kill anthrax.

For some inexplicible reason while I was reading this, I was reminded of a passage in The Diamond Age after Fiona jumps off the boat while she and her father are on the way to London.

The man with the dreadlocks hauled Fiona out first and handed her off to her father. The fabricules making up her clothing – countless mites linked elbow to elbow in a two-dimensional array – went to work pumping away the water trapped in the interstices. Fiona was wreathed in a sinuous veil of mist that burned with the captured light of the torches. Her thick red hair had been freed from the confines of her hat, which had been torn away by the waves and now fell about her in a cape of fire.

There’s something intrinsicly cool about the idea of smart clothing – not in the standard “embed a computer in the fabric” sense, but in the Diamond Age passive nanotech sense. Let’s face it, if you need a computer with you at all times, get a PDA or a Hiptop or whatever. But smart clothing – clothes that wouldn’t stick or stain or stay wet or fade – that would get me to go replace my entire wardrobe immediately.

“Although,” thinks the guy who realizes the irony in his wearing four year old cargo pants and an Orbital t-shirt, “that’s not saying much.”

Outside of our little extravaganza over on DDRFreak, there doesn’t seem to be much going on April Fools wise this year. Luckily, Corey at MacGamer has written his usual schtick, and had me nearly on the floor with this one about Amy Torres’ blog.

Emphasis mine:

I think I heard my beer speaking to me. It was the most beautiful moment of my entire life. It said “I love you, Amy. Seek knowledge. Don’t forget to knock me back by the way because I’m awesome”.

Roofles indeed.