Mekka

The writing is on the wall for the Music Industry.

Harvey Danger releases their new album via free downloads on the Internet.

Why did they do it?

From their press release...

"Why we’re releasing our latest album for free on the Internet

In preparing to self-release our new album, we thought long and hard about how best to use the internet. Given our unusual history, and a long-held sense that the practice now being demonized by the music biz as “illegal” file sharing can be a friend to the independent musician, we have decided to embrace the indisputable fact of music in the 21st century, put our money where our mouth is, and make our record, Little By Little…, available for download via Bittorrent, and at our website. We’re not streaming, or offering 30-second song samples, or annoying you with digital rights management software; we’re putting up the whole record, for free, forever. Full stop. Please help yourself; if you like it, please share with friends.

Of course, the CD will also be for sale on the site, as well as in fine independent record stores across the country, in a deluxe package that includes a 30-minute bonus disc that serves as a companion piece to the record proper (retail price for the package is $11.99).

We embark on this experiment with both enthusiasm and curiosity—and, ok, maybe a twinge of anxiety. Why are we doing this? The short answer is simply that we want a lot of people to hear the record.

However, it’s important that people understand the free download concept isn’t a frivolous act. It’s a key part of our promotional campaign, along with radio and press promotion, live shows, and videos. It’s a bet that the resources of the Internet can make possible a new way for musicians to find their audience – and forge a meaningful artistic career built on support from cooperative, not adversarial, relationships. (ed. emphasis mine)

We realize that digital files are the primary means by which a huge segment of the population is exposed to new music; we also believe that plenty of music lovers in the world will buy a record once they’ve heard it – whether via radio or computer.

We also believe there’s an inherent qualitative difference at work—not only between MP3s and CDs, but between clicking a mouse and finding a record on the shelves of a good record store. These experiences are not mutually exclusive – they’re interdependent facets of music fandom, and equally important considerations for a band in our position.

Even with the proliferation of websites and magazines paying attention to independent music these days, it remains difficult for bands—especially rock bands—to get exposure, regardless of how good they may be (or how successful they once were). Making the record freely downloadable removes the main barrier that exists between an artist and the world of potential listeners. And we do mean world; the web’s reach is everywhere.

Whether or not people will buy something they can get for free is obviously a big question, and there are facts and figures to support both sides of the argument. We think it’s not only possible, but likely. The more fundamental challenge is ensuring people have access to your work to begin with.

At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, making records has never been about making money for this band. If the worst thing that happens is a whole bunch of people hear Little By Little… and no one buys it, we’ll know our experiment was costly. But that won’t make it a failure.

This is by no means a manifesto. We don’t pretend to be the first band to spin a variation of the shareware distribution model. We love record labels and record stores. We buy lots of CDs and are committed to supporting independent music. We’re not a bunch of fake Marxists. We’re just trying to be smart capitalists so we can sustain our lives as musicians. This is an experiment. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Meanwhile, please enjoy the record. Everything else is secondary."

BRAVO!!!

[Found at Mixed Content]

No shoes?

"Bobby Martin, 17 years old, is a noseguard and special teams member for Colonel White High School in Dayton, Ohio.  He also happens to be three feet tall, having been born with no legs.  He was recently removed from a game during halftime because he wasn't wearing shoes, thighpads, or kneepads.  Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed shortly thereafter. "

Wow.

[Found at MetaFilter]

I'm retiring to Denmark!!!

Sexual Healing

The Danish government pays for the disabled and elderly to watch porn and have sex with prostitutes.

Caregivers in Copenhagen have found that pornography and prostitutes have a greater calming effect on their elderly patients thantraditional medical treatment such as drug therapy.

The caregivers have told Danish media that pornography is healthier, cheaper and easier to use than medicine, Lars Elmsted Petersen, a spokesman for the Danish seniors' lobby group Aeldresagen, said.

(Via Marginal Revolution)

[Found at Ottmar Liebert ]

Clinton's Worldview

He free to say whatever he wants now, so he chats on about everything from AIDS in China to global warming to Roswell (Yes, that Roswell) at the recent CPSA Investor's Forum in Hong Kong.

"So I think there's a lot of economic opportunity if you can figure out how to organize a clean-energy sector.
I'll just give you one example. In America today, I reduced the energy usage of the Clinton presidential library, which is a huge, glass-and-steel building. I cut the energy bill by 34% by doing only two things. I put 305 solar reflectors on the roof and I built the floors out of compressed bamboo, running miles and miles of tubing underneath where we put cold water in the summer and hot water in the winter, and just those two things cut our energy usage by 34% and also my contribution to climate change.
There is now a three-month back-up in the States for people ordering solar reflectors. Today, in Latin America there are a million poor people who get all their energy for light and cooking from small-scale solar generators attached to their homes and the cost is about the same as a month's supply of candles. There could be 100 million down there, there could be 500 million down there. There could be a billion in Asia. The money is enormous to be made out of doing the environmentally responsible thing. The price of solar energy is dropping 15% a year, with economies of scale.
I flew into Copenhagen the other day, and if you fly over, you see the bays full of windmills. I've been to the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa, and in Tenerife, the biggest island, the south part is covered with windmills. China is beginning to get into wind energy. The price of wind energy is dropping at 15% a year. The efficiency of the turbines is far better; now they will turn with less strong winds. And they're easier to maintain. If I was a young entrepreneur, and I could figure out how to do it, I would organize a fund to develop clean energy.
The possibilities of creating energy through conservation are staggering. America today uses 9% more oil than it did 35 years ago even though our economy is twice as big - because of conservation. And we could easily double that again. And there's money there. Sixty percent of the energy put in to generating electricity in most generating facilities across the world is waste heat.
Now I could give you lots of other examples, so, my view is that if I were doing this in the short term, I would be trying to figure out if there were any good deals in oil. In the medium term I would be looking to see if there's anything to this clean-coal technology.
Can you really trap CO2? And can it safely be deposited in the ground? And will it stay there or will it just come back as methane and still make a contribution to global warming and therefore the whole technology will be a waste? And can we do anything to create, on a large scale, what is inherently small-scale technology in solar and conservation? Because, basically the new-energy economy, unlike the old one, is disorganized and undercapitalized, highly entrepreneurial but without any political influence, anywhere in the world. But we have a chance now to think about this because you've got $65 oil.
And I don't care what happens, the price of oil may drop, but I'd be astonished if it doesn't go between $45 and $75 a barrel and bang around in that range for the next five years - and then go higher after that…so that's my take on it, and that's what I would do if I were 25 years younger and starting a different life. And I might be broke in a couple of years, but I don't think so."...

Part 1, Part 2.

(Found at MetaFilter)

Zero Emmissions in the Future?

"Smaller than a DVD player - small enough to sit comfortably under the hood of any truck or car - it could be big enough to solve the world's greenhouse gas emission problems, at least for the near future.

In fact, it could make the Kyoto protocol obsolete. "

[Found at MetaFilter]

Rescuers Find 76-Year-Old Man in Big Easy - AP News

KREM.com | News for Spokane, Washington | AP Headlines:

Staff Sgt. Jason Randor, a military police officer with the Massachusetts National Guard, watched the rescue from another boat that was helping provide security for the search team. He recalled jubilant yells from the firefighters when they realized someone alive was inside.

Martin emerged, wearing jeans and a shirt.

"While they were putting him in the chopper, he asked if they could stop on the way at Taco Bell to get something to eat," Randor said.

Organic concrete

Organic concrete

BETÃO ORGÂNICO, by Lisbon-based architects and designers e-studio, is an organic concrete developed to conciliate the vegetable and the inorganic in a single element.

Exploiting concrete’s capacity to retain humidity, the material functions as a battery in which the water is released during dry periods. Applied as a surface, organic concrete makes it possible to obtain permeable living surfaces, offering a natural component for public urban spaces.

The work will be shown at experimenta design, Lisbon, Sep 16 - Oct 30.
More concrete: self-scrubbing buildings, bendable concrete, carbon-eating cement, communicating concrete, light-transmitting concrete.

[Found at we make money not art]

Another hydrogen pellet technology is announced

Another hydrogen pellet technology is announced

 

Researchers at the Technological University of Denmark have announced the creation of another solid-state form for  storing hydrogen. In this scheme, which differs significantly from  hydride storage techniques, ammonia is absorbed into a  tablet of sea salt in what appears to be a twist on the  ammonia borane concept. The  ammonia would be released from the salt in some unspecified manner (through heating, perhaps), and when passed over a  catalyst, it would release hydrogen. This would result in a relatively safe way to store energy, without high pressures  or risk of fire or explosion. Ammonia is already one of the most common industrial and agricultural chemicals (not to  mention its popularity with meth producers), and some feel strongly that it’s  suitable for use as an energy storage mechanism. A  thank-you goes out to our reader sine~language for the tip.

[Found via Autoblog]

Katrina: Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11.

Katrina: Wardriving occupied New Orleans on 9/11.

I tend not to post too much on current news events such as this, but I felt not only did this story serve to show what a couple of technologist citizens are doing to help, but also what our government is doing to hurt the situation.

Via Xeni Jardin:       

Image: a New Orleans resident who remains in the city, and says he will not leave. Behind him, code markings left by rescue and/or disaster mortician teams. Shot in NOLA today by Jacob A., Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead).

Jacob Appelbaum and Joel Johnson are in the New Orleans area, helping with communications reconnect efforts and documenting what they witness. They have connectivity, a solar-powered backpack, iChat capabilities, and the ability to do live streaming video.

This morning, I woke up to my cellphone ringing with Jacob on the other end. He and Joel were on foot inside NOLA, seeing corpses in the streets. Jacob was trying to decrypt the markings spray-painted on a trash dumpster by DMORT (disaster mortician teams). "What does '9705 CF' mean? Does CF mean corpses found?" asked Jacob. From what I could figure out, the markings meant that a team visited this spot on Sep. 7, and observed that there were dead at this location. Four days later, the body (or bodies) had not been removed from the road. "I gotta hang up," he said, "the death smell is too much, we have to get away from this spot now. This place is a perfect example of duality in response. Some parts of the city are heavily guarded and under repair, other parts of the city are flooded and full of locked, unsearched houses."

On the phone with another friend who's there with a television news network -- my friend says, "This place looks a lot like Iraq. Only in Iraq, when there's a dead body, it's never on the street for more than an hour -- someone, Iraqi or US forces, rertrieves it right away. Here, they're just sittiing out there for days, weeks, rotting." 

Jacob blogs:

We’re heading into the [New Orleans] city center for various reasons. I’m bringing a gps unit, a laptop with a 200mw 802.11b card and a laptop on the car power inverter. We’re going to log and then make maps tonight.  If I provide kismet logs with GPS information is anyone interested in making a google maps hack? It’s certainly possible to make this a once a day operation.

Snip of an earlier post from Jacob last night, when he and Joel were visiting the home of Malik Rahim (his portrait is below.):

    As I’m sitting here, the only light I can see is the light of my laptop illuminating my fingers. My cell phone would light up if people could call in. Only rarely does that work, no one has left voicemail but when they do get through they tell me they’ve rung for hours, upwards of two dozen times.

We didn’t have to pass through a single check point to enter the city, we simply went around them. There was much debate about the amount of danger we would be in by coming here and so far I feel pretty safe. We didn’t bring a gun, partly because we didn’t want to believe it would be so bad that we would need one and because it was probably impossible to get one at such short notice. I don’t think that was a mistake, we don’t need firearms. I do find it pretty surprising that the American government has recently hired Blackwater security forces to patrol the streets here. At the same time they’re removing firearms from citizens who rightfully feel they need them. It’s a strange future we’re living in and have no doubt about it, we’re living in the future. It’s too bad that we’re living in that other future, the dystopian one. The one with terrorists, murderers, corruption at the highest government levels, global wars and a world with an environment being destroyed by serious pollution. A world where people are now literately drowning in it.

(...) We recently got video streaming working from one of our laptops. Some of the best hackers on the planet decided that our neo-gonzo journalism was worth some bandwidth, I’m pretty flattered and I hope I don’t let them down. I hope they’re ready to watch Joel and I cook food, build computer networks, scout antenna locations and otherwise talk about the current state of New Orleans.

There’s that light again, the patrol seems to be pretty frequent. The helicopters are flying overhead again. I wonder if they have thermal imaging gear? Certainly they’re working overtime to patrol the skies but I wonder what they’re collecting data on and what they plan to do with it.

The people on the ground here, Malik being the main man, are really righteous people. They’re getting ready to help the citizens of this parish to live, to eat, to be clean, to sleep safely, to communicate with the world.

(...) Hopefully all the plans we have will actually work out, hopefully we will be able to get more fuel into the generators, hopefully we’ll get more generators on the ground. Hopefully we’ll be able to get better uplinks without having to resort to using the cell network but it seems doubtful. I haven’t heard back from the people at DirectNIC. I suppose they’re busy with something else, hopefully someone else can supply these people with uplinks to the real world.

It’s late and I have to be up in the morning because the military is going to march down the road here in some sort of security exercise. I want to photograph it because I can’t believe it’s happening in an American city. 

 

Image: Corpse at a school in the Algiers region (15th Ward). "It has been there for probably 10 days," says Joel Johnson, who shot this photo, "but despite the neighborhood informing the police, it has not been removed... we asked two federal officers about it and they were unconcerned." Link to his photostream (contains graphic images of dead.)

Joel blogs about the damage to New Orleans, and gear requests:

Jacob was kind enough to write up an updated list of equipment. If you can ship this stuff to Baton Rouge, we can probably use it. No worries if you can't, but the more we have, the more we can deploy. We expect to deploy everything we brought with us from Houston, save perhaps the big Wi-Fi antenna (but you never know). Also, Verizon, if you'd like to loan me an activated Samsung i730, I can give it back to you when I'm done.

Joel also blogs about allegations that a volunteer nurse named Bobby Lee Huss was apprehended just outside of NOLA by armed Homeland Security forces, who seized all of the medical supplies from his truck at the request of the Red Cross. Anthony Lappé has more details on GNN:   

According to Huss, he was given over $25,000 worth of medical supplies by the Red Cross in Covington. He claims he was given all the necessary credentials and Red Cross workers helped him load up his 1989 Dodge Caravan. But not less than 10 minutes later, he found himself staring the barrel of a gun at a Homeland Security checkpoint on the north side of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. According to Huss, a state police officer told him the Red Cross had requested he be detained.

Shortly after a Red Cross official showed up and said he wasn’t authorized to have the supplies (The Red Cross is officially mandated by FEMA to act as their on-the-ground medical and relief agency). Huss says his van was ransacked and the supplies were confiscated. He says he was interrogated for hours by state police officers, who asked him about his entire background, and even accused him of being a child molester because he had baby supplies in the van. Huss said he had just went through an FBI background check.

Huss said he wasn’t released until 12:40 AM Sunday morning, after 11 hours of detention. He says he was only given one bottle of water and was held for most of the time in the back of a police cruiser. He was given his van back, but the supplies were confiscated. “They are keeping supplies from people who are in need,” Huss told me. Huss also accused the Red Cross of hoarding much-needed supplies.  Huss is now on his way back to Texas, demoralized and angry. “Tell the people of Algiers I’m sorry,” he said.

Link to the full text of Anthony's post. 

 


Joel blogs about confrontations with armed private security contractors from Blackwater:

We got yelled at some by police and official-types who wanted us out of areas where they were operating. Herding media isn't really their job, but they weren't rude about it (just brusque). The Blackwater employees, on the other hand, were phenomenally unpleasant. Jake has a lot more to add soon, I'm sure, but there's a serious question as to the authority of these mercenaries.

Previously:

Bloggers Joel and Jake visit NOLA for geek aid

Blackwater gets carte blanche.

[ Found via Boing Boing]

Thomas Secker

Thomas Secker

"If you would not step into the harlot's house, do not go by the harlot's door."

[Motivational Quotes of the Day]