critical thinking

The ISP business in North America is all kinds of shady. They half-ass the upgrades and paint all sorts of floweriness in advertising and generally piss all over us. The fact is that they are not meeting demand, and really hope we won’t notice.

So when they offer us super-mega fast connection speeds, all it takes is a swing through Speedtest.net to see that a bronzed piece of shit is still a piece of shit. My biggest complaint is that when Shaw advertises up to 25 Mbps downstream, they aren’t mentioning that to get that speed you would have to be the only one using your shared pipe, which is normally shared by seventy-five or so other connections. I rarely see more than 800 kbps on my 7.5 Mbps line. I’ve certainly never seen 2 Mbps. Telus lines are not shared the same way, but they still suffer from a lot of noise that slows you down anyway.

If I had a lot of scratch, I would contract with cities and municipalities to build the infrastructure for a fibre network and lease it to the ISPs. And yes, with all that bandwidth, I would work with cities to offer free wi-fi (at a throttled rate to protect the nicely co-operative ISPs).

Fibre is the future (and has been since 1986), and they should stop fucking around.

Wow. Just wow. And wow. An Edmonton cabbie gets accused of sexual assault by four girls because he wouldn’t let them smoke in his car. It could easily have led to his on-the-spot summary beat-down by your average drunk frat boy crusaders, so he was lucky. I support a lot of the principles of the feminist movement, and I respectfully suggest that these women are not doing women any favours. What low-life contemptible human beings. I hope he wins his $60,000 suit, and I hope it’s very public. I hope they get utterly humiliated. I get the impression that these particular wenches don’t have much in the way of self-respect or dignity though. Just a lot of twat.

I can’t help but be reminded of other stories I’ve heard, about vindictive school girls accusing their teacher of rape, and even though there isn’t a fact in the universe to support the accusation and the case doesn’t even make it to court, that teacher doesn’t stand a chance of keeping his job, or even his profession.

Sorta makes you want to video capture your entire life, just so you’ve got it to hand when the accusations fly.

It occurs to me the strongest incentive to pay for music is to avoid the pathetic level of literacy to which 99% of pirates seem to aspire. If failing to legibly fill out the ID3 tags for a song were punishable by death we’d be out of pirates by next Wednesday. And considering how much time I’ve lost repairing useless ID3 tags… death is almost too good for them.

It’s simple, friends. First, no underscores. I will punch you in the face. If your ripper adds underscores to every track name it’s time to invest in an update for your Windows ’95. Second, use the damned ID3 tags! It’s not rocket surgery! Again, if your ripper can’t edit ID3 tags then climb your punk ass out of the 90s! Hey- there’s even a spot for your URL spam so you don’t have to pollute the file name!

If you can’t do the world at large this simple courtesy, then please don’t bother ripping CDs. You are not contributing. You are stoopid.

BTW, this is not an invitation to enter into the debate on piracy. The fact is I’m happy to support the artists I like. I adamantly believe file sharing is the best thing to happen to the music industry since the Walkman. Anyone who buys into the absurd rhetoric that file sharing is hurting the industry doesn’t pay enough attention to statistics. Sales boomed along with the advent of portable music, then slacked off steadily as the industry insisted on churning out garbage. People were bored! Digital transmission couldn’t have come along at a more desperate hour. With the common adoption of the interwebs, file sharing encouraged millions to make music a central part of their lives and once again, sales surged upward as music went uber-portable. If the industry is seeing sales flag again, they should be paying more attention to their product, not the consumer.

The bottom line is two-fold: there are people who might buy a thing, and people who will steal it. Facilitation is irrelevant — there is no such thing as copy-proof. And these people who will buy a thing will exercise judgement when they spend their money. They won’t buy it if it sucks (and the people that wouldn’t buy it anyway will persist in doing so). So… if the people aren’t buying it…?

Seems like a gimme to me.

So I download music every once in a while, and I continue to be a music-listener. I pay for the music I want to own. I delete the garbage. This ability to instantly sample any artist about which I might be curious is what keeps me interested in music. It also makes me more critical. I don’t blindly swallow whatever the Big Labels force feed me. They have to work harder and earn my money, thank you very much. No wonder they’re flailing so much. Only Apple has made any headway, and they aren’t a music label.

It’s the same revolution that has turned the news industry on its collective ear, and politics along with it. We have the power to make our own informed decisions now, and I don’t take that lightly. They don’t get to take advantage of my ignorance anymore just because they are Huge Corporations. I have to choose to let them. Fair.

Explore. Question. Then consume to heart’s content.

And stop using the underscore.