Random Thoughts

It's now after 1 in the morning as I type this and I decided that today's post would be whatever random thoughts that pop into my head. First of all I realized that there is no mail link on this page, but that has now been rectified. Second I began fooling around with Flash MX. Not quite as daunting as I first thought but it will take a while to produce something cool. I'm think of making my bio page with flash as a kind of experiment.

I bought the Star Wars Episode III soundtrack today and noticed something I've never seen before. On the back on the CD case as well as on the CD itself, I noticed a large FBI warning about copying. The MPAA has gone on a crusade of not only suing site owners and independent software designers, but also attack students and individual users. Now I'm not condoning illegal copying and from personal experience I have rarely downloaded much, most of what I bought later or never even used, but the MPAA should start to chill out. 7-10 years ago the music and movie industries had the chance to begin the online distribution of entertainment media in a why that would have opened up a new market. Instead these companies gave a big thumbs down to the tech people who came to them with these ideas. Some of these people went on to work on the P2P software we use today, others moved on the codec development or other endeavors. My point is that the MPAA and the entertainment had a golden opportunity all those years ago. Ten years ago PCs where still rather user-unfriendly and all the drag-n-drop applications we have today didn't exist. A 300MB hard drive was considered cavernous and I struggled with a CLI version of Winzip to span a 15MB file across multiple floppy disks (do I even own any of those today?).

My point is that stopping the spread of piracy is a noble effort, but these companies also need to work on an alternative that is better, easier and faster than the current pirate alternative and users will pay for it. The iTunes store is a perfect example. If I could access it in Japan I would be buying songs online. Now if my iPod would only stop crashing and stop making my life difficult.

Random enough?

Wisdom of the Day: If you drink 4-5 litres of water a day, you will have a very intimate relationship with your toilet.