Photographed near the Flemish coast (near the charmingly named Boerenhol), in Flemish Zeeland.
Popularity: 71% [?]
Archive for October, 2007
Has the steady stream of easily accessible science fiction on television and the Net started to kill off some of the most venerated SF magazines? According to Warren Ellis, sales for Asimov’s Science Fiction is down 13%, sales for Analog is down 7.3%, and apparently the readership for Interzone is only somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000.
Popularity: 62% [?]
I love Radiohead. I love the stance they take on political issues, I love the intelligence behind their sound and lyrics, and above all I love their music. And now, like an already perfect woman who turns out to be a former Cirque de Soleil acrobat and whose father owns a pub, Radiohead dared to be different and experiment with the traditional music distribution model.
For their latest album, In Rainbows, the group made their album available for download online before it was available in stores. And the buyer decides on a price to pay. How much is this album worth to you? The full price you would have paid at iTunes or HMV? Only three or four pounds? Or (horrors) nothing? I would guess that the majority of people will pay far less than full price, but more than nothing. Probably anything between a pound and four pounds. Which is already more than the cut they would have received from their record company.
Thus far, it’s brilliant. Not only is the album undoubtedly great, but the added exposure and media buzz will further boost sales. Sadly, though, the execution falls flat in several places. Finding an FAQ on the site was difficult, and I had to go back several steps. But the FAQ did answer my question: they “accept all major credit cards”. Great, as I have an AmEx card. Paypal would have been better, but whatever.
Before getting to the checkout I had to register, including supplying a mobile phone number. Nasty. And once on the checkout page… apparently there are only two major credit cards, Visa and Mastercard. Major they may be, but they’re not the sum total of the credit card world. So bugger bugger bugger. I offered to pay three pounds, but with no way of paying it I was stuck. No contact form or e-mail address (that I could find) so no option of contacting them and complaining.
So the only option left… be a moocher. Kill the cookie, start the process again, and offer to pay the princely sum of nothing. Zilch. Nul point. Downloading the album via P2P would have been less stressful and much easier, and saved them the cost of bandwidth to boot. But of course I didn’t want to “steal” the album, I wanted to buy it on terms acceptable to both the artists and to me.
So lets hope the teething problems are temporary, that the experiment succeeds magnificently, and that the future of music distribution lies in artists and their fans sharing a common trust and love for music. With one-click Paypal payments.
Update: According to The Times, “an internet survey of 3,000 people who downloaded the album found that most paid an average of £4”. Word on the street has it that the album sold 1.2 million copies in its first week (more than the three previous Radiohead releases combined).
Popularity: 57% [?]
And the LOLCats meme (mentioned here before) goes rolling on: the LOLCat Bible Translation Project aims to have the whole Bible translated into LOLCat, bringing the good word to a whole new type of cat.
28. & Ceiling Cat sented them hais, so teh ballz & teh multiplyers, & haz teh dominion on teh waterz, no waterz & teh firmmint, & evry thingz & stuff.
29. & Ceiling Cat sayed, Yo, Beholdt, the earths, I has it, & I has not eated it.
30. For evry createded stufs tehre are the foodz, to the burdies, teh creepiez, & teh mooes, so tehre.
31. & Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthx bai.
Popularity: 67% [?]
Nice, George Takei is to get his own heavenly body. Asteroid 1994 GT9, located between Mars and Jupiter, will now be known as 7307 Takei.
Popularity: 59% [?]
It often appears as if the Bush Administration can’t be any more rotten at the core than we already know it to be: an institutionalised disregard of United States law, a failure to protect the privacy and security of its citizens, and a complete rejection of the rational and scientific world view. And then the yo-yo spins and falls and plumbs ever greater depths:
A small private intelligence company that monitors Islamic terrorist groups obtained a new Osama bin Laden video ahead of its official release last month, and around 10 a.m. on Sept. 7, it notified the Bush administration of its secret acquisition. It gave two senior officials access on the condition that the officials not reveal they had it until the al-Qaeda release.
Within 20 minutes, a range of intelligence agencies had begun downloading it from the company’s Web site. By midafternoon that day, the video and a transcript of its audio track had been leaked from within the Bush administration to cable television news and broadcast worldwide.
More from the Washington Post.
Popularity: 53% [?]
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft takes off on a journey of nearly 3 billion kilometers, to study the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Not only does scientific exploration partly define us as a species, it also makes for some spectacular photographs.
From the NASA Image of the Day Gallery.
Popularity: 52% [?]
