I keep meaning to figure out getting the default WordPress parser to put a linebreak at the beginning, but I’m not quite there yet. It seems to be making a call to a function that doesn’t exist at the transition point.

The only problem is, it still parses [br]s, so now everything that was correctly formatted is now ultra-spacious. Because this comment thread wasn’t long enough.

Interesting.

Let’s see if it is now.

P2P gets a bad press, but it actually enables further purchasing. A friend recommended me Battlestar Galactica way back when, and I watched the entire miniseries that night, and then ordered the first season from America the next day. Without it being available illegally for download I wouldn’t have ever seen it, and I wouldn’t now be watching it some 50 episodes later (and having bought the second season too). And we all know how series like Firefly were assisted by internet support, saving them from complete death. P2P got the episodes out there and Fox actually MADE MONEY because of it.

Artists absolutely have a right to support themselves via their work, but there’s no reason why they have to make millions. I’m not an anti-capatalist but I think it’s always had a mixed relationship with art in modern times. Films for example wouldn’t be where they are now without it, but then again, films are also worse off for much of its influence. The same with TV, but then TV studios current obsession with viewing figures and advertising revenue is causing them to drop amazing series which deserve an audience, and few TV studios are motivated towards making good TV at the risk of a loss (I guess HBO and BBC being two that are).

Anyway, I’m struggling to remember things that I’ve talked through a lot recently in the real world, so I’ll leave it there!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still ripping off content all the time and you may well be right about “most people”. All I’m saying is that I personally have moved through that membrane, and if you’d told the penniless teenage me that I’d someday pay money for content you’d have gotten nothing but laughter.

Joss Whedon’s a really big little guy :) Know that I never got into Buffy so for me, Joss Whedon=Firefly, which only moved forward because of fan effort impressing the studio execs.

I don’t know what more we might do with data, which is perhaps not surprising – if I did, I’d do it and usher in a new era of human civilization, and I don’t like to do that on a Wednesday. But I’d like to think we’re being closed-minded in patting ourselves on the back about our worldwide communications network. Metal made weapons much more elegant and powerful when people were mostly warriors, and they probably assumed that was all it would ever be good for. The revolution it facilitated was in a completely different direction, and involved an application far more complex than they could have envisioned.

These days I think we’re mostly chatterers, rather than warriors, and we’re understandably impressed with the elegant and powerful new ways in which we can chatter. That certainly accelerates progress, as did making better weapons, but my feeling is that it’s not the most world-changing or interesting thing we’ll ever do with our newfound ability to manipulate huge quantities of data quickly. In fact, maybe better weapons will be.

What HTML tags did you use? I only saw linebreaks in the source, so I added br tags. It may be that my Text Control plugin has started behaving differently since I upgraded WordPress recently.

Jason: that’s an interesting attitude. Was the main drawback of piracy for you the idea that money wasn’t getting to the creators? My theory assumes that for most people the main negative side is the perceived risk of legal repercussions, or more generally an unwillingness to get involved in anything illegal. More people would claim moral objections, of course, but you do find a lot of people refer to fundamentally practical concerns as moral ones when the behaviour they encourage is the same.

The reason my theory hinges on that is that if they’re already doing it, and getting away with it, fear of repercussions diminishes. Whereas if they’re already doing it, but are morally uneasy about it, the impetus to switch to legitimate methods wouldn’t fade so quickly, and more people might be ready to switch to them when they become available.

Is Joss Whedon little?

Rob: Do you say you *should* be able to because you like the idea, or because it’d be good for the people who create it? Artists who are willing to do it can already put their stuff out for free online via loads of channels, and many do, so what’s wrong with the current system? Obviously that most of the best guys have chosen to demand money in exchange for their work, but should they not even be allowed that option?

I have no morals, and I’m not going to castigate anyone. I’m only interested in the uniqueness of the current art-exchange climate, how it happened and how long it might last. It’ll either go down in history as the digital equivalent of the sixties, a brief window during which everything seemed free, or the beginning of a new world order that defines the future of art and culture from here on out. Either way, exciting!

The point that often gets lost is that you *should* be able to download films and music for free – legally (and/or if you want, you can see them in the cinema/hear it in concert or buy them on DVD/buy a CD).

But because the word ‘industry’ so easily seems to suffix both of those media, this will never ever happen in the mainstream, since the internet is apparently not meant to be used a social tool to share art. Which is bollocks.

What are the bets those HTML tags didn’t work? Or this.

What else might we do with data? The future is definitely about finding new ways to use the information available to us. We once had a paucity of it, and it was hard to find. Now we have an abundance and it seems like jobs of the future will mostly involve interpreting it. The future of journalism, for example, is apparently not discovering information, but rather putting the information we already have together in interesting ways. Things like SETI, which devote spare processor cycles to crunching data, also seem like the tip of the iceberg. We need vast, sentient supercomputers that can take all the data we have and use it to shape the future. I’m sure if you had something sufficiently advanced at recognising patterns and connections, you could cure cancer. Or at least build a really great repository for porn.

Is communication primitive?

Actually in honesty, this was a post which was interesting and made me feel compelled to respond, the only problem is I couldn’t think what to actually respond with. So err.. yeah – I agree with your points.