Discuss

Hi there..This is really an enriching post. well, a lot of us really have desires like this, to have wonderful cars and chicks beside us.lol

I fail to see the connection between owning a broken television and being "so freaking wasteful."

Shame on you, Laura, for not having consumer electronics that last forever!

"Last week my five-year-old, twenty-seven inch television went into early retirement. It was about time for an upgrade anyhow, "

You have the audacity to comment on our wasteful society, when you yourself are so freaking wasteful?

You people, just disgust me.

local singles want to get into uranus! lawl!

good article. nice to see something about UTD in AMP.

nice idea. good article.

I enjoyed reading your posts.You shared information that is valuable to me and some other readers. Keep posting as I will be visiting this page from now on. Cheers.

Something is old, which means its good, right?? Even if they had no understanding of what they were doing and have never had proof of effectiveness, right??

I just love seeing the word "nature" abused as if something being "natural" means it is the best possible option, despite the often arbitrary distinction between what is natural and what is not.

For the record, NCCAM still dismisses a majority of quack science claims. Simultaneously, it's also a decent resource on some nutritional supplements. They do receive funding to conduct double blind studies, and their white papers are free to read when they have them available.

Oh, and "your mother", homeopathy IS b.s. When you say "natural", you probably mean "herbal", which does work effectively in some cases. SOME CASES, mind you. A lot of it's probably just crap.

Furthermore, FDA regulation doesn't prove effective on EVERY pharmaceutical out there. How many lawsuits have people won because of fatalities caused by unintended side-effects of prescription medication? But, that doesn't discount that Zicam is b.s. also. I'm just saying that FDA regulation DOES NOT guarantee a safe product.

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several. One was to partner with companies like America Online, a fast-growing subscription service that was less chaotic than the open internet. Another plan was to educate the public about the behaviors required of them by copyright law. New payment models such as micropayments were proposed. Alternatively, they could pursue the profit margins enjoyed by radio and TV, if they became purely ad-supported. Still another plan was to convince tech firms to make their hardware and software less capable of sharing, or to partner with the businesses running data networks to achieve the same goal. Then there was the nuclear option: sue copyright infringers directly, making an example of them.

As these ideas were articulated, there was intense debate about the merits of various scenarios. Would DRM or walled gardens work better? Shouldn’t we try a carrot-and-stick approach, with education and prosecution? And so on. In all this conversation, there was one scenario that was widely regarded as unthinkable, a scenario that didn’t get much discussion in the nation’s newsrooms, for the obvious reason.

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.) Hardware and software vendors would not regard copyright holders as allies, nor would they regard customers as enemies. DRM’s requirement that the attacker be allowed to decode the content would be an insuperable flaw. And suing people who love something so much they want to share it would piss them off.

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.