Posts tagged fail

Jonathan Coulton on the whole MegaUpload dealy.

The real question in my mind these days, and what I was trying to get at with my little tweet, is: how much does piracy really hurt content creators (specifically, me)? Professional smart person Tim O’Reilly posted something that made me think about this question again in regards to SOPA/PIPA. He points out that any proponent of SOPA/PIPA starts with the assumption that all this piracy is causing great harm to lots of people and companies. Here’s his pull quote, taken from a recent statement about SOPA issued by the White House:

Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation’s most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders.

Is it really as dire as all that? It’s an emergency is it? Tim points out that he and a lot of other content creators have been happily coexisting with piracy all this time, and I’m certainly one of them. Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV. A lot of us have figured out how to do this.

Key excerpt, for me at least. I ran into the issue raised in the final paragraph, a few months ago. I was bored and slightly drunk from brunch on a Saturday afternoon, and got it in my mind that I’d catch up on the final four Harry Potter movies. So sue me. Whatever. That it was Harry Potter isn’t necessarily the point. Three of these films - Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Part 2 of Deathly Hollows -  were available on Amazon video for rental. Score!

Of course, I didn’t realize Part 1 of the Deathly Hollows wasn’t available on Amazon when I started this drunken marathon. But you can believe after the first two, I was in the mood for more. And I wasn’t about to ruin the series by watching Part 2 before Part 1. I won’t say what route I took to watch it, but these were my legal options after scouring Netflix Streaming, Hulu+, Amazon OnDemand and iTunes:

• Wait two-to-three days for a DVD to arrive from Netflix
• Go to Blockbus..oh.
• Go to a DVD sto..oh. I mean, I suppose I could’ve taken the train 20 minutes to Best Buy at Union Square, bought the DVD of a film I was only going to watch once, take the train 20 minutes back home and … shit. I don’t have a DVD player anymore.

I won’t tell you the course of action I took. Only that the entire experience was exasperating, annoying, and thoroughly made me want to not watch the rest of Harry Potter.

I don’t get how this is hard to understand.

I decided I might try to go back, slowly, not using it for anything important, just a ‘hey, people I used to know, I’m still here if you want to get in touch, here’s a little bit of contact info’ type thing.

I’ve taken to using sub-email address tags to properly mitigate the torrent of automated email I get every-day: I can sign up for most services with myname+service@gmail.com. I can then filter by service very easily.

Facebook doesn’t let you use sub-email addressing. 

Guess I won’t be coming back to Facebook anytime soon.

Why do you suck so much? Why are you the worst developer tool Microsoft has ever built? Why can I not inspect DOM generated by JavaScript?

I hate you. Die. Slowly. In a vat of acid. You’re little better than alert-debugging. And so. Very. Fucking. Slow.

Welcome to my personal hell. Icepick, meet IE’s ocular cavity.

I’ve been trying to catch up and read a bunch of old William Gibson books that I missed. Penguin Publishing, apparently, is schizophrenic in offering these books. Examples:

In the Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive), only the first two titles are available on Kindle. 

In the Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties), only the second two are available on Kindle. 

Booku has Virtual Light listed, but “restricted availability” - Penguin Publish has restricted it from the US, according to them.

What gives? Is it demand? Is it the cost of converting something to kindle/ebook (it can’t be that expensive)? It’s pretty darn ironic, considering the topics of these books.

With the fare hikes, I thought you might have improved service. But of course, like always, you never fail to disappoint. Nine years of weekend shuttle bus service on the L. Thrice in the past week my nominally 35 minute commute has been elongated to an excruciating 70 minutes, crammed into a corner between stops in a claustrophobic press of sweat, coffee, and bad breath. I wouldn’t mind the cramped squeeze of the L if it actually ran half the time, you see. I still have four inches to maneuver my phone to read my books.

But seriously. Track improvements are your excuse for weekend bus service — filled with drunken revelers in the wee hours — but all I see are more inconveniences during the week. Less trains. More delays.

Maybe it’s time to get a bike.

So, MTA needs to beat an $800 million deficit.

They’re proposing raising fairs by quite a bit. Again. After cutting service - especially a vital bus line down Wyckoff Ave. in Brooklyn that services a hospital (the L stations there are not handicap accessible). And after cutting cleaning service - have you noticed how filthy the cars and stations have become over the past few months?

 Yeah, for us monthly users, it’s only $132 extra per year. But what are we getting for this hike? Probably nothing. The last time they hiked the fares, they reduced service. Are we going to get service reductions this time around, too?

Why not look at ways to increase ridership, instead of decrease it? Perhaps you, MTA, should be working on how to lower the price instead of increase it? 

As is, this fare hike might be the kick in the pants I need to get a bicycle and lose my monthly. An OK bike will cost me what, $500-600? That’s about half what I spend on your increasingly shoddy service per year. (Case in point: the L train was filthy this morning, and delayed thrice between Graham Ave and Union Square, each time for five minutes)

Ya’ll done goofed.