Don't look behind the curtain

It seems that the US was probably releasing oil from the reserves for the last few months to begin with, so Bush's announcement today should only have the effect his words carry, no more. It seems likely even the stopping of the collection of the royalty (paid in oil) on the Federal Government's oil lands will have little effect, other than letting those lucky producers sell at the peak of the market and make up their royalty oil at a later date when the price is better. I'm not the only one to realize this. I wonder how many people think of it that way?

I'm glad I only have to drive miles a day to work now.

The Reign of Youtube

For a very long time I've been trying to "get" YouTube. I'm not certain I'm "get"ing it yet, but I'm a lot closer than I used to be.

First, let me talk about Google Search. Google Search delivers a product every time you use it. If you wait a few weeks, you get a different product for the same input. It's a useful thing. YouTube, on the other hand, does it's unique value add once, when it converts a video. From then on, it's storing a static video. It provides some other useful community-type features, but mostly the value after conversion is storage and transmission.

So, there YouTube is, providing a nice video converting/distributing service. It's costing them a ton of money for this service, and some day, they have to capitalize on their popularity. So how are they going to do it? So far, they have tried to stay away from being a 'Napster' type of service. I think they will continue to do that. The problem is they need to add a value to their properties that users and advertisers can both benefit from.

So how are they going to do it? This has been bothering me for a long time (I knew about YouTube for some time prior to their public launch). We all know it's a neat service, but no one has figured out how it makes money.

Contemporary media services sell ads that they believe consumers see. If it's a magazine, it's some page you have to flip past. If it's regular TV, they assume you sit through the commercial (and most people probably do). Tivo has added some ability to change normal TV, but even TiVo has apparently started trying to show more ads, and perhaps limit the ability to skip certain ads. This is not what a consumer wants. Consumers want to watch their TV. YouTube users certainly like sharing their videos, and for a video that may be a few seconds long, enduring a 15 second ad first might be untenable. Ad people were spoiled once upon a time, when the only option to sitting through commercials was channel-changing.

The answer to the difference in needs is probably exactly minimally-intrusive ad placement. YouTube's major value add is converting a video and letting people find it. They drive traffic to the YouTube site, but once YouTube has converted a video, this is wasted. If YouTube is daring enough, they might be able to make a lot of money without making their users angry. If YouTube added a peer-to-peer aspect to their video viewer, they could offload the huge bandwidth problems. Now, I don't meant hey should be like Kazaa. What I mean is that if someone is viewing a YouTube video, they should be helping distribute video to other people. This would take the load off of YouTube's servers somewhat and allow something that is currently unattainable...HD content. This doesn't generate revenue, but it lowers YouTube's costs. The next thing is to allow "sponsorship" of a video. Not all video on YouTube is commercial or popular. Some of them might just be some family video for Mom and Dad. Making people endure ads for that might be mean. However, for popular videos, a "Sponsor" might be viable. It wouldn't have to be much, just after a video runs, throw up a "Brought To You By JimBo Cola!" or whatever. Sponsorship for a day or an hour, bid on in an auction would probably be the best way. Then the sponsors get to place ads on specific content. People who don't want their video "sponsored" wouldn't have to have it. YouTube could just do the initial video conversion/upload and ad-service, and let people help them distribute the actual content.

It'd be non-intrusive, and someone with a popular video could actually make money, since sponsorship could pay the video creator a percentage (oversight possibly required, but doable). It might also make steps toward trying to solve the issue of bandwidth. Even if YouTube comes up with enough money to survive indefinitely, the physical demands of bandwidth currently limit their content distribution.

Food for Thought.

East of Eden: The Book Review

Recently, I've read The Borgia Bride, Great Expectations, The Mysterious Stranger, and East of Eden. The Borgia Bride is an easy-reading type of what I would call Historic Romance. Great Expectations was possibly the first Dickens book I've read, and I'd call it a 19th Century Soap Opera. The Mysterious Stranger was a great, but short, story by Mark Twain, I recommend it but don't feel like reviewing it. East of Eden was another thing entirely.

I've read The Pearl, although it was a long time ago and I wasn't particularly enamoured with Steinbeck. I wasn't expecting all that much, especially after being slightly disappointed with the depth, or lack of depth, in Great Expectations. East of Eden, however, turned out to be an entirely different type of read than I expected, in a very good way.

The characters were quite one-dimensional, which is normally a minus. Steinbeck painted a very good picture with these characters, as they were easy to identify and the fact that they were just that one-dimensional and unchanging was a pillar for the book to sit on.

It was just a great read and I highly recommend it if you haven't read it.

The Death of a 1000 Paper Cuts, or Intellectual Property Rights

Over at Livejournal, I keep a link to Paul Phillips so I can read his comments and reader comments when I get bored. Usually, I don't post much myself and it's really just brain candy, but something got stuck in my craw. First I read this post and then went down a little and asked a question, since Mr. Phillips tends to believe IP should be voided. His argument is here and he has hosted some talks on it here and here. I'm sure there some other brilliant minds of the internet conversing on it, but this is what got me started and I'm going to examine my current thoughts and ideas before I go off and read any more opinions.

My current thought is that it seems necessary to be able to protect your ideas in order to continue to work on them. Since we live in a capitalist society, one must make a living somehow. There are undoubtedly many people in the world with great ideas that will publish them and share without a reward, but there are also a lot of people who cant' pursue their inventions without some sort of monetary reward.

That being said, my initial belief was that patent and copyright law is there to help the invdividual protect their inventions just long enough to turn this necessary profit, and to protect them from investing a lot of resources into something, and then having it used by a giant corporation or the like. As I said, I have not gone and done the research on this yet, that's just where my feelings start from. At the moment I believe this is the 'spirit' of the origins of patent law, although certainly not the current 'letter' of the law.

Mr. Phillips just happened to post another interesting entry about Nikola Tesla, which I did read after I started this article and gave me some more food for though. Tesla had a number of patents, but did not collect royalties and was subjected to great pains attempting to secure funding due to his mismanagement of his money. Oddly enough, he became beholden to the whims of financiers to work on his projects, when patent law would have provided him the means to avoid them. This seems on the surface to be exactly the argument for patent law, and the intended example of how they would be beneficial to invention, instead of the opposite.

However, this also leads to an interesting thought, because Tesla's patents were much more complex than what we typically here about today. Tesla was basically patenting methods for radio broadcast and what have you. I haven't read all his patents, quite possibly he had some minor ones that covered trivial items. In at least a few instances, though, he had some very brilliant ideas developed from time and money-consuming research.

Compare this to Jeff Bezos' and the patent for 'one-click' shopping. 'one-click' doesn't pass the common sense test, it's a trivial idea. However, it apparently passes the letter of the law (at least so far).

Tesla envisioned providing wireless power to remote places anywhere on earth. Poor countries and people would have had access to this power fairly easily. There's a lot politics and economis involved in that equation, but arguably Tesla would have powered the entire world. I don't think 'one-click' has any such aspirations.

Unfortunately, this is where patents start to fail. How can you decide if an idea, no matter how trivial, can really qualify for a patent? After that, when you start patenting basic things needed by just about everyone you start to choke inovation. Who, for instance, wants to pay Amazon to avoid having 'double-click' or 'triple-click' shopping?

Now the interesting thing is copyright. Copyright has a more extensive life than patents, and has gone way beyond the lifespan of the creator simply to create the commercial properties of Disney and the like.

Seems a mess. Mr. Phillips answer is to do away with all Intellecual Property Rights, but if that's the case, I suspect we will develop another problem, much like the Masons of previous times, everyone wanting to profit from their ideas will share them with no one. Possibly this would be a minor, or almost non-existant issue, but I'm not convinced the innnovation would run as free as would be hoped.

Music, I don't care so much about. There are problems with music both ways. If you wrote a song 40 years ago and it becomes the new hit theme song for Cheesy Poofs, maybe they need to pay you royalties. On the converse side, why do I have to pay royalties to Disney for something created decades ago by a guy who is dead? I just try not to buy too much music (actually I just rarely listen to music, almost all of which I have on cd, thanks for making me sour, RIAA!).

Anyways, the interesting case is not music, but things like software. Sure, you can remix a song and sell it for a while, but software you can build huge programs on top of. That's where the innovation choke becomes a real problem. I'll have to think about that some more.

The Disaster of the Disaster

Through links at Rave Colburn's weblog I have found out that the Red Cross has not been allowed to enter New Orleans.

Cnn is also reporting that we have at least nine stockpiles of gear around the country for emergency that aren't even getting used!

Now the Washington Monthly has spotted the Washington Posts's story from the Whitehouse trying to lay the blame on the lower parts of the government.

No bucks stop here.

The Politics of Disaster

I have seen people on tv debating the 'politicizing' of the hurricane. Well guess what, this is a natural disaster involving a government response. There is nothing more political than this. This is the execution of the results of political philosophies. The political decisions of the past have had their direct results in this disaster. The unpreparedness of FEMA, the lack of leadership by the President, it's all political. They have a a political agenda and it dictated their response. Don't ever forget that.

I have seen a claim that Federal troops couldn't be brought to NO until the governor of Louisiana requested federal help. Really? Well why didn't Bush go ask the governor to give him the power to assert federal authority in Lousiana for this disaster? He had not problems asking all of Congress to grant him authority to enter a foreign country and use military force.

This country is being led right now by psycophants and the weak-willed. Let's hope no other disaster strikes, because there is no one taking charge and solving the goddamn problem.

Andrew Bashing

I only drop by Andrew Sullivan's website everyone once in a while these days. He's an intelligent guy, but you often have to wonder if he wasn't in a persecuted minority if he'd be as reasonable as he is. Whenever I see him post something like
"And they hate me and other non-left-wing gays with an intensity that is so often the hallmark of those who have lost the argument." I have to wonder.

There are certainly all types of people that spew venom and hate for poor reasons, but when I hear someone acuse the 'far left' of hatred, I wonder what they are talking about. If are you are far left, you should have a Gandhi-like approach to things. I think it's more likely that those who see things in a more black and white light prefer to paint a picture that puts their detractors in a light most like how they see the world.

I think that gets to the fundamental difference I see between myself and conservatives. I don't pretend to think that everything I currently think about the world is just how it is. Whenever my perception changes, my thinking changes.

Andrew Sullivan actually tends to exhibit this thinking change, which seems good. He just doesn't seem to want to deal with the fact that pacifist lefties aren't his enemy.

The Path of the Righteous

The Supreme Court has now issued a ruling on the ability of a municipality to seize private property for 'the general good', and decided that this can encompass projects that generate tax revenue. I don't know if the court ruling was correct (not 'right' but correct, seeing as how they are interpeting law), but I'm not much of a fan of eminent domain. You might think by the way he talks, G. W. Bush isn't a fan of it either, but you'd be wrong.

The ruling party seems to have taken a very Orwellian stance these days. It is worth noting that when you believe yourself to be Righteous, you no longer listen to arguments from the non-believers. We all have a personal filter, and when your filter blocks out everything but what you are looking for, things start to distort. Take for instance, the Media. When I read it, I see a lot of worry about Dick Durbin after his comments. My personal filter tends to bring up things like that, that I consider 'bad' as a liberal. On the other end, conservatives no doubt tend to notice things said about them. At the moment, I fill like Durbin is going down. This might just be my filter. Do conservatives think Rick Santorum is going down when his comments get him bad press?

Back to my original point, if you are Righteous, your filter is so strict you can't see anything but what you are looking for. You tend to believe the media and everyone else is tilted because you only notice these things. I'm hoping I never achieve a level of Righteousness myself that makes my personal filter too strong to see the good along with the bad.