I’ve been thinking more about Google/YouTube’s new music streaming service terms – the ones that require your whole library, that require 320bps source, that require five year terms, and so on. I wrote about it last week, talking about how Google is letting the old labels dictate away crowdfunding rewards and the like.
But I’ve been doing more thinking since that. It’s been churning in my brain. And I’ve realised the five-year term, the 320bps requirement, and whole library thing have a combined intent.
And that intent is to take away literally every last music sale you might make. As in, every last music sale.
It’s not presented as such, of course. I think they want artists to think of it as radio that pays. But two of the big streaming service problems have been 1. quality (smaller concern) and 2. stability of material (huge concern). All the television streaming services, for example, have been plagued by shows getting yanked on and off and moving around. Customers find that annoying.
Meanwhile, you have the label involvement, discussed before. They were, from all reports, pretty tightly into this new set of terms. And one of the big problems for the labels the last several years has been the rise of indie artists. The crowdfunding/long-tail model has given indie artists something more to live on, ways to make money outside of the label ecosystem.
This solves both sets of “problems.” Think about it:
Google will have everything you do for five years, listen-anytime, at functionally CD quality. They’ll have everything, and they’ll have it first, at optimal quality. What’s that mean?
It means Google/YouTube Music service members will have no reason to buy any goddamn thing from any artist which is on the service. No more early-access advantages to entice crowdfunding backers. No more deep tracks on albums to discover. No more alt-takes, no more remixes, no more mailing-list exclusives – Google will have it all. Not exclusively, of course! But they’ll have it.
If I’m reading this right, then even if you hold out on them – you don’t upload some tracks, in violation of the agreement – if and when somebody else does, and they identify it as yours, they’ll add it to the service automatically. Tell me I’m wrong (even though I’m not) because that’s what this sounds like:
So even if you don’t explicitly deliver us every single song in your catalog if we have assets and they are fingerprinted by content ID to contain that music then it will be included to the subscription service…
— Zoë Keating’s Google rep., in conversation with Zoë
Which means there’s no more reason to buy anything from you. No reason for anyone to deal with you at all.
Five years is a long time. There will be no long tail – at least, not for you. It’s all going to them. Five years is also plenty long enough to keep you locked in once you figure all this out. And five years is more than long enough to try to make this the new standard.
That’s the point of this whole contract. To take everything else away, and thereby, to reinstate a kind of 1971, one managed by making both unlimited internet distribution and piracy completely irrelevant.
I have to say – it’s brilliant. It end-runs around the post-scarcity environment entirely, by co-opting it. The pirates and illegal uploaders will make sure your entire catalogue is up there, even if you hold out, and it’ll be included whether you like it or not – it’s genius!
Meanwhile, they’re “giving the music away” so you can’t make any money on it, stopping you from being able to reward patrons and backers so you can’t make any money there either, and tossing you a sharecropper’s pittance in ad revenue as a reward. And even that is a pittance you can never hope to make on your own. You don’t – and can’t – have the numbers.
It’s a plan that takes away the entire internet/indie route as they understand it. It’s to make them – both the old labels and Google, in alliance – the only viable path. It’s a plan to make it so that once again, you have to go through them.
And we all know what that has always meant, don’t we?
Run. Run like hell.
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The 4chan Strangler who murdered a woman and posted pictures (and participated in discussion) on 4chan after the killing is still on the loose. THIS IS A REAL STORY, NOT A JOKE. It is believed the suspect's name is David Kalac. The car he is believed to have stolen was last seen in Portland, Oregon.
BE WARNED THAT IN RESPONSE TO MOD DELETIONS, 4CHANNERS ARE REPOSTING THE PHOTOS ON OTHER SITES. Some of these sites are linked in the 4chan reddit. Repost sites include imgur (multiple times), imcute.yt, and others. So far, they are not on large sites like tumblr or twitter, tho' there have been attempted reposts on reddit which got people banned.
There have also been reposts of the entire thread. This thread is violently misogynistic in both visual and text content. If you take any extra steps in the event of 4chan misogynist upsurges (blocking images, etc), take them now.
So, yeah. “The Caretaker.”
I’m getting pretty close to “ring me up when Moffat is gone from Doctor Who.” And I’m not that entirely sure I’m going to turn on my phone’s ringer. Because right now, there is so very little to like and so very much not to, and I am out of patience with Mr. Moffat.
I don’t like – to paraphrase James Nicoll – that at the rate we’re going, we’ll end up with an entire episode consisting of the Doctor negging Clara for 50-odd minutes straight by the end of the season.
I don’t like Clara again being defined so entirely by what men think about what she’s doing. I particularly don’t like – as Leeson on The Doctor Who Podcast said – that it feels like some sort of competition of who is better at taking care of her. She’s a goddamn adult, she doesn’t need taking care of.
I don’t like Danny Pink anymore, in no small part because of what I just said. I kind of liked him in the first episode; since then he’s become more and more weirdly erratic and demanding in ways that set of alarm bells for me. (I did like him when he went all soldier-and-officer on the Doctor, though, in this episode. I’ll say that.)
I don’t like the Doctor demanding explanations about Clara’s boyfriend, even if I don’t like that character. Wanting to know? Sure. Feeling hurt or isolated if he’s kept out of the loop? Okay, I can see that. Demanding like he has some sort of goddamn right? Fuck you, Doctor.
This show has made me think, “FUCK YOU, Doctor. FUCK you.” And wow, do I not want to be thinking that.
I can take an abrasive Doctor. Sometimes I like it. It’s a delicate balance, a challenge, and I’m not convinced it’s a good idea, because in episodes like this, you end up with nothing to like about this Doctor, or any of these characters. Don’t get me wrong, that can work. You weren’t supposed to like anybody in Absolutely Fabulous either, and that didn’t stop it from being completely genius.
But I think the way Moffat is running this version only works if you have previous regenerations of the Doctor in your head. One, to remind you that eventually he’s not like this, and for another, to place this into contrast, which makes this in turn more interesting.
That’s called “writing entirely for the fans,” and over time, it’s a really bad idea.
But most of all – on top of everything else, the thing that really punched me in the face, the thing that’s making me think that maybe I’m done…
I really, really don’t like the Doctor turning the black maths teacher into “the PE instructor” over and over again.
I really do not fucking like the Doctor playing racist tropes as dismissals.
See, here’s the thing. I can take my own ox being gored with more … grace? With having more stomach? I can more easily deal with problematic material that’s problematic towards me than I can with problematic material that’s that so very problematic towards others. It’s one thing to be all dismissive of humans, I’m fine with that. It’s another to be pulling out racist shit.
Now, I’m willing to listen to people to say this isn’t such a fucking racist trope in the UK. I only want to hear it from Britons, and really, I prefer to hear it from Britons of colour. But I’m willing to listen to that.
Something tells me, though… I don’t think it’s that different.
eta2: Anna has added her reaction over on her blog. She has other issues I don’t.
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I have triumphed over the Open Sources and have made the nvidia GT520 driver work. I am now running a new kernel along the way, but hey. I also discovered bugs in Xorg -configure, as well as the nvidia configuration tool, and it only took 11 hours.
I can also now build the latest 3.2 Linux core, but that’s just kind of a side effect.
And this is for the official nvidia driver. Don’t believe me? Here are the instructions on how to install it, from nvidia themselves.
They do tell you that you have to have a full development environment and sources and headers for your kernel. They don’t tell you their driver doesn’t work with the realtime kernel and will fail without error. (Or panic your machine – one of those, depending.)
So will the open-source drivers, by the way. That’s fun.
Honestly, figuring that “this will always fail silently forever except when crashing your machine despite what the build instructions say” part out was the biggest hurdle. There’s a patch you can apply for the 3.4 downstream realtime kernel, but that’s even more out of phase with the rest of Ubuntu 12.04LTS than my previous custom realtime kernel was, so, yeah, no.
RANDR still fails so the GUI for monitor preferences still crashes if you try to run it, but I don’t use that anyway and I think that’s because I’m running Xinema mode – it was true for my previous card setup to. Both monitors started individually run RANDR and the GUI just fine.
“Ready for the desktop” HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA sobs
(The Windows install was more a matter of “here’s the driver” “yup that’s a driver” and “no I want this monitor on the right” “okay” and done. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO GET ME TO SING THE PRAISES OF WINDOWS?! I mean goddamn.)
But it’s all working. Anyone playing Elder Scrolls online?
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James Nicoll pointed to this post on Scripting News, wherein the author tells a story about a guy he hired who didn’t do any work, had to be fired, then sued on the basis of discrimination, all back in 1985. The author lays out this gem:
[E]very time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn’t there to work, rather is there to scam you.
…and proceeds to deny that he’s advocating only hiring young white men. (The white part comes in later, in comments.)
Here’s my reply, in case it doesn’t get unscreened:
The statement that you made very much advocates hiring only young males, whether you want it to or not. ”[E]very time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn’t there to work, rather is there to scam you.”
The meaning of the sentence is that people who aren’t young men might just be scamming you, and that young males, by exception, are not out to scam you.
Young women need not apply: might be out to scam you! Anyone over whatever your definition of “young” age is need not apply: might be out to scam you! Risky! Young men, by contrast: not part of the problem; not out to scam you.
What do you think this advocates?
And yes, there is an implicit whiteness in this, by virtue of the point of “Roy” using civil rights laws to sue you. C.f. all the people in comments picking it up, and comments already made that “this scam only works because of protected classes.” You may not want to own that, but you put it out there.
The underlying assertion, of course, is bullshit. I’ve seen exactly this work behaviour out of your “young males” more than once. When I was at Microsoft in particular, I saw this a couple of times, and how your “young men” had to be so carefully nudged out the door to prevent them from being able to sue either. I saw your “young males” doing it when I was doing research in academia. It was project-destroying.
But that’s not part of your story, now, is it?
Stories matter. We tell stories for reasons, and we pick stories we think have meaning, and meaning we want to communicate. And yours, here, communicates certain things very clearly – whether you want to admit it or not.
My only regret is failing to mention that exactly this thinking is exactly how Bitcoin’s Reddit forum had posted in their FAQ not to do business with people identifying as women online, because it was probably a scam.
Awfully similar language, don’t you think?
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I have seen a fair number of Kickstarter burnouts and explosions, but I have never seen one like this.
( I've been told that this may be a little triggery for some people, so here's a cut. I'm taking it as a huge ragequit combined with performance art, because the artist in question has a history of that. But to be safe, I'm putting it under a fold. Click to expand. )
WHY YES APT-GET WHEN I TYPED NO I DID ACTUALLY MEAN YES AND WANT YOU TO BLOW AWAY OUR WEBSITE CONFIGURATION. THANK YOU!
Configuration file `/etc/apache2/apache2.conf' ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation. ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version. What would you like to do about it ? Your options are: Y or I : install the package maintainer's version N or O : keep your currently-installed version D : show the differences between the versions Z : start a shell to examine the situation The default action is to keep your current version. *** apache2.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? n Installing new version of config file /etc/init.d/apache2 ... Remove obsolete configuration file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf Removing obsolete conffile /etc/apache2/mods-available/version.load ...
This should only affect people trying to hit murkworks.net (as opposed to www.murkworks.net or crimeandtheforcesofevil.com or any of our hosted domains), but it’s still insane. And if you see any problems, this is probably why. We’ll have to pull the old files out of backup and Anna (webmaster) is out for a couple of hours.
GOSH I’M GLAD I DIDN’T GET TO OUR PRIMARY WEBSERVER. >_<
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“Emergency eye surgery.” Those are not happy words.
About a week and a half ago, I got a big floater in my right eye. I get floaters more often than most, but it’s never been a big thing, and it seemed to be breaking up on its own, like they do, so I ignored it through the GeekGirlCon show with the intent of going in to make sure it’s not the 3% of time that posterior vitreous detachment (harmless) leads to retina detachment (problematic) or tears (extremely problematic and can lead to blindness).
Monday morning it seemed to have got worse, and that was new, but I was making the appointment anyway, so I went in. Dr. Khan agreed from the symptoms that it was probably just ordinary stuff, but of course, the whole point of going down there is to get a look.
And yeah, it’s not. Dr. Khan transferred me immediately to a retinal specialist, who said it is PVD, but with an outright retinal rip, and I have two other spots in the same eye that are damaged, and very likely to lead to retinal rips. The damage in all cases is very old, and the sort caused by multiple head trauma events.
So I have emergency surgery tomorrow morning. They’d've done it today, but it wasn’t an option unless we moved to overnight at Swedish, and that’s actually pretty bad because they don’t have the specialised eye crews overnight, and we’re better off waiting ’till the morning. If all goes well, I’ll be fine – tho’ down a lot of money, despite coverage.
And that gets me to something I don’t talk about much. I don’t remember most of my childhood, mostly because of my broad-spectrum abuse history. Psychological abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, multiple abusers. It’s all kinds of fun.
In the extremely unlikely event that you know anything about my past, which almost none of you do, I want to make a point here of exempting my last guardian, whose initials were E.E.. E.E. was the closest to a decent parental figure I ever had, and none of this, none of it, is on him. This was all before his time.
The others, tho’… yeah. I’m not going to name names, because hi, lawyers. There’s one in particular here – I’ll call him Mr. B.
Mr. B was fond of academic rigour, in particularly through pain, in more particular through punches to the head. I have a bunch of healed but fortunately minor skull fractures from his particular breed of rigour.
I hadn’t heard from Mr. B in decades, until – now that he’s old and sick – he started cyberstalking me a couple of years ago. I blocked his accounts but he made new ones, until went so far as to reply to one of his over-the-transom missives from a donated, throwaway account, saying that okay, I know what he wants; I want to know who my birth parents were and how Mr. B and his associate Ms. A got ahold of me. His price was being “welcomed back into my life,” which is happening never, thanks.
So I can keep that out of my life just fine, thanks. And with the help of a therapist, I’ve managed to keep Mr. B and Ms. A out of my head, a lot of the time. (Ms. A has had the decency to disown me outright. Not fond of the queer, you see. Simplifies things, sometimes, doesn’t it?)
But apparently old blows can still cause physical harm, even today. I thought Mr. B had had his last shot at me, but apparently not. One more blast from the past, eh, Mr. B?
We’re going to fix that, tomorrow. With lasers.
It’ll leave me with limited vision for a couple of weeks, but hopefully will only really knock me down for a couple of days. So maybe I won’t be around for a bit.
Or maybe I’ll liveblog from the operating room. Who can tell?
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...it indicates that at least one senior interrogator recognized that the Bush administration's refusal to recognize that there were innocent men at Guantánamo -- and it has been clear for many years that hundreds of innocent men were held, who had no connection whatsoever to any form of militancy, let alone terrorism -- had set in motion a system in which, whether voluntarily or not, all the innocent men at Guantánamo were expected to make false confessions, either so that they could continue to be labeled as "enemy combatants" on release, to maintain the illusion that Guantánamo was full of "the worst of the worst," or, as in al-Rabiah's case, so that they could be tricked and transformed into terrorist sympathizers and facilitators.Happy yet, you fucking fascists? You got a defence for this? No? How 'bout a whole fucking truckload of prosecutions. Anybody up for that?
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