The Rust Belt

  1. Life is Too Short

    When indulging myself in joy­ful escapism, the first thing I look for is story with char­ac­ters I care about, prefer­ably in some type of an s-f set­ting. The later is not nec­es­sary but the least I demand from a pop-cultural prod­uct is that its more or less fic­tional world be either believ­able or won­der­fully absurd. There are already thou­sands of nov­els, movies and video games that meet these require­ments, with more com­ing every year so I already know that I will be able to expe­ri­ence only tiny frac­tion of what is offered. But how bad is it really?

    read the rust of it →

  2. Once Again – Treat Pirates Like Competition

    A voice of rea­son from Robin Harris:

    But if the movie indus­try doesn’t want to go the way of the record com­pa­nies, they have to adapt.

    The movie industry’s chal­lenge is to cre­ate com­pelling con­tent priced so the audi­ence has no inter­est in pirate copies. Yes, there will always be rev­enue lost to pirates.

    The cure: give peo­ple a good prod­uct, rea­son­ably priced and con­ve­nient. That, not encryp­tion, is the long term solution.

  3. The Library Without Walls Already Exists

    Robert Darnton wonders:

    Can we cre­ate a National Digital Library? That is, a com­pre­hen­sive library of dig­i­tized books that will be eas­ily acces­si­ble to the gen­eral pub­lic. Simple as it sounds, the ques­tion is extra­or­di­nar­ily com­plex. It involves issues that con­cern the nature of the library to be built, the tech­no­log­i­cal dif­fi­cul­ties of design­ing it, the legal obsta­cles to get­ting it off the ground, the finan­cial costs of con­struct­ing and main­tain­ing it, and the polit­i­cal prob­lems of mobi­liz­ing sup­port for it.

    read it before it rusts →

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