And furthermore…

[Geekologie via itchymutt]

I know that there are lots of people out there who can’t afford gas as it is, and who will be seriously hurt by further increases in fuel prices. But in the long run, we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels–and obscuring the true cost of gasoline only exacerbates the problem.

Short version of the above:

Why should my tax dollars be used to subsidize the cost of your gasoline? Tell you what–if gas is so important to you, YOU pay for it. I’ll just keep investing my money in bus passes and my own two feet.

Unfortunately, my secret wish–a 3G iPhone with a QWERTY slideout keypad–remains unfulfilled.

But more relevantly, the announcement leaves things kind of insane in the iPod pricing world: you can grab an 8 gig iPhone for $199, but an 8 gig iPod Touch (which is just an iPhone without the GPS or the phone functions–including, critically, cellular data) costs $299. So you’re paying an extra $100 for less functionality. Now, I know, the Touch is much thinner, and probably more importantly, you aren’t gonna have to commit to a year of paying at least $60/month to activate it. But nonetheless, how are you going to explain the intricacies of subsidized cell phone hardware to the average consumer, who doesn’t give a crap about such boring things? Answer: you aren’t. You’re going to lower the price of the iPod Touch so it at least matches the iPhone’s, and you’re going to subsequently sell a billion of them.

So I look forward to that announcement. But I was really expecting it today–the announcement of the iPhone price cut seemed like the right time to reassure consumers that Apple isn’t trying to rip them off (remember how upset you idiots got when they lowered the iPhone price the first time?). If it doesn’t happen soon, I suppose Apple will just save it for October, the better to make lots of money around Christmas.

I find this sneaky ad to be very good.

Does this ad terrify anyone else? The first few times I saw it it really disturbed me. IT LOOKS LIKE THAT FIRST GUY IS GONNA SMASH HIS HEAD!

I’ve been thinking about how there are two ways I play video games: I either play them to play them (most sports games, Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Tony Hawk 3, Tetris and other simple puzzle type games), or I play them to see what happens next (Half Life, God of War, um… I don’t play a lot of this type of game).

Basically, I don’t really care about what happens at the end of Tony Hawk: Underground or NHL 98 or Tiger Woods 2003. I just like playing, and getting better at it, and then stopping eventually.

But with Half Life (and Shadow of the Colossus, and Quake/Doom before them), I don’t really enjoy the gameplay that much. I mostly want to see where the story goes, or what new areas I can open up, or what cool new aliens I can find and blow apart with what cool new weapons. In fact, I prefer to play on god mode so I don’t even have to THINK about playing well (and those jerk game designers still manage to design levels where god mode alone isn’t enough to get through it). I’m extremely confident that if I ever play Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Eleven it will be the same thing.

And it’s not like the games in group A are all built for pure gameplay while the games in group B are built for an unfolding interesting plot. It may seem that way from the games I listed above, but, for example, when I was in college I used to play some baseball game all the time, and I didn’t really like playing it all that much. I just wanted to finish the interminable season (there are 162 games in a season, plus as many as 21 (I think) playoff games; it took about half an hour to play each game; do the math). A lot of it was just my weird compulsion to Complete the effort–to recreate, in microcosm, the months-long slog that is the MLB season–but I also wanted to see the (inevitably disappointing) digital celebration that marked a victory in the Computer World Series.

And I used to play Grand Theft Auto’s various games the same way as I do Half Life. For those of you who haven’t played GTA, it’s the prototypical sandbox game–though there’s a narrative plot you can follow, it’s really just an elaborate but tiny universe in which you can mess around. You just run all over town, stealing cars, running over pedestrians, fleeing the police, over and over and over again. But when I play the game, I tend to get caught up in the plot (some variant on: you start out poor and friendless, you work your way up in the criminal underworld until you ultimately control the city), trying to complete various missions and move on in the narrative.

There is one exception that I can think of, one game in which I actually loved both the gameplay and the gradual revelation of the story and new levels: Portal. That’s it! That’s the only game in the history of ever that I consider a complete success. Unfortunately, it’s only 3 hours long, and I beat it months ago.

Part of this is me, I’m sure. If I didn’t suck at first person shooters, there would probably be some games that I could get through without sweating, and that had enjoyable storylines and interesting enough visuals to satisfy me. But my ineptitude, and the resulting dichotomy in my gaming experience, have let me to these observations, and I think they’re somewhat valuable as a more general way of looking at video game design. I have read enough criticism of this industry to know that combining these two attributes–great gameplay and a compelling narrative–is far more difficult than it might seem. Either that or it’s just not something that most game designers are interested in.

For many years, in my opinion, game designers have recognized the difficulty of succeeding in both aspects–and have chosen to make sure that the gameplay is great. I believe that commercially, this has been a smart move–most game purchasers have been fast-twitch nerds with nothing better to do than sit around mastering complex game mechanics (kidding, sort of–I’m just bitter because no matter how long I spend on it, I just can’t get good at any of these games…). So you get games like Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Halo, Call of Duty, etc.

And let’s look at some of the historical outliers, games that aren’t necessarily aimed at the hardcore gaming community: Civilization, Sim City, Mario Cart, Grand Theft Auto, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, Wii Sports, Katamari Damacy. These are sandbox games. You don’t have to know what you’re doing to jump in and enjoy them. Though you can get better at them, you don’t have to do so to continue enjoying them. And every time you play, even if you never “advance” in the game’s storyline (if one even exists), it’s a new experience.

So, okay, great. Game designers (and the companies that employ them) make a pretty good living making and selling these games. Consumers eat this stuff up. Hell, I eat this stuff up. What am I complaining about?

I am complaining about the missed opportunities. Why aren’t there more games like Portal–games that incorporate an interesting story and fun gameplay? Hell, why aren’t there more games that have a really great storyline and merely passable gameplay? Now, to be fair, it’s more than possible that these games are out there. It sounds like Bioshock may be a pretty good start (although with a major problem–your ability to make choices is supposed to be a big deal but they don’t, from what I hear, actually have any effect on the outcome of the game). And maybe I’m the only person who cares–economically, designing and marketing a game just for me is probably a bad business decision. But I’m still waiting on a game that tells a really good story without being, essentially, a rail shooter.

Which reminds me. Everything I said about Portal is true. It is a terrific game, with a fun story and fun gameplay. But it is a rail shooter, too. You can’t effect the outcome of the game–either you die, or you end up winning the game in one particular way. So although it balances the two traditional strengths of video games, I don’t think it actually serves as an example of the synthesis I’m looking for.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. I’m an english major. But there’s gotta be somebody out there interested in and capable of combining the fun, and the unfettered freedom, of a sandbox game with the storytelling that envigorates so many other mediums.

I’ve written far too much at this point (and I haven’t even mentioned World of Warcraft or any other MMWAORPs), so I guess I’ll just sum up by saying that I think video games have the potential to be every bit as smart, as insightful, as persuasive, and as important as music, or literature, or movies. And a video game can do one thing that those other media basically cannot: incorporate the “reader”. I’m not going to get into it (or into the many problems that pop up when you allow the player to mess around with the narrative), but it’s the one thing that video games have going. They don’t have to be passively absorbed; they can draw the player in, use the players choices to craft a unique setting and story. And, at least so far, most of them don’t.

Good customer service fever… catch it!

Will the Victoria’s commercial be TV-14? Earlier this season, TMQ noted that NBC’s Sunday night football wrap show is rated TV-14 — I wondered whether I should let my 12-year-old watch it. Reader Rebecca Seidel of Monroe, Conn., writes, “Tell Spenser he shouldn’t watch the commercials. While the NFL itself keeps programming clean, not all of its sponsors feel the same way. Based on the assumption that mostly adult males will be the ones watching football past nine on a school night, the ads tend to get a little racy.” On the East Coast, half the Super Bowl will occur past 9 p.m., the hour when networks start allowing racy ads. Risqué is fine for adults, but should it occur in the context of the one show per year that every little kid in America is allowed to stay up late to watch? We’ll see how the commercials stack up this year.

Okay, so here’s my question. WHO CARES? I know, I know. Lots of people care. But I think it’s ridiculous. So what if a bunch of pre-teens see cleavage? What’s the worst case scenario? Youngsters all over America start humping their couches? Do you think there’s any way to prevent, or even slow, adolescents’ discovery of the human body, in all its sinfulness?

Three years later, is there any reason to think that Janet Jackson’s ruthless baring of a nipple had any effect whatsoever on the millions of children who caught a glimpse? Aside from scandalizing a lot of adults who are just desperate for something to be shocked about, this “issue” is a complete joke. I’m sorry, but I just can’t bring myself to give a crap about sexually provocative images on television.

You want to know what this is about? This is about parents feeling uncomfortable sitting in the same room as their kids when this stuff is on. They don’t want to talk about sex with their kids. They think that keeping provocative images and other evidence that human beings have sex away will mean that children will never ask them about it or even, heaven forbid, just go out and do it.²

Suffice it to say, this perspective is incredibly stupid. Pretending a problem doesn’t exist is the surest way to exacerbate it. And taking superficial steps to keep a problem out of sight just means it’ll be that much more problematic down the road. And, of course, this would be an appropriate time to note that we as a country have bigger fish to fry than the possibility that our children might find out about mammaries.

Bring on the TV-14 ads. We can handle them.

¹ I don’t know what spurred this witch hunt, but Easterbrook is clearly on a mission. He “contributed” to this story about a long-departed Patriots employee who seems to be blackmailing the team with public statements indicating his willingness to reveal something or other he did when he worked for them. After a year of blind speculation based on how little we know about the situation, I don’t take him seriously anymore. But it’s getting really tiresome watching him go after the Patriots for doing what I have no doubt that every single team in the league is doing, in one way or another. I could go on, but I won’t–you get the point.

² By the way, I just want to make clear that I don’t think kids having sex is a huge problem. I think kids (and adults) having unprotected sex is a huge problem. So maybe instead of pretending sex doesn’t exist, is wrong, and must never happen, we ought to try something else. Like acknowledging it as a fact of life and doing our best to make sure that the consequences of youthful indiscretion aren’t so serious.

And, to be honest? I find myself sympathizing with a lot of these assholes. A lot of people DO take websites and games too seriously, and it might not be so awful that they be reminded that, at heart, most of this stuff just doesn’t matter much. There’s nothing fundamentally new about what’s going on here–wits have used similar tactics to poke fun at and criticize aspects of human nature and pop culture for as long as we’ve HAD human nature and pop culture. And without this irreverence, this willingness to point out the absurdity of human enterprise, I think we would all be in big trouble. Or at least, life would be extremely boring.

Now, that being said, many of the pranks these guys pull are a combination of stupid and unoriginal. It’s hard to explain the difference, but I found the standard race-baiting described in the Wired article to be sophomoric and obnoxious, while I found the attack of the flying penises (also described in the article, along with a couple of memorable photos) to be kind of… delightful.¹ Part of the difference is that the person who got penis-pranked was e-famous for being an Internet Big Deal–the phallic punking reminds us all that Second Life is, at its heart, kind of ridiculous. Meanwhile, you get stuff like this (sports-talk radio listeners invading a press-only conference call to say obscene things to a college basketball coach)–completely unclever parroting of racist/sexist/homophobic material meant to do nothing more interesting than offend. I’ve spent enough time on the internet to find that sort of thing tiresome (as opposed to offensive–I don’t think it’s possible to offend me with anything online, anymore).

And there’s a darker side to this, too. While I completely agree that people shouldn’t take internet drama so seriously, the fact of the matter is that there will always be people out there who do. Is it still funny to do things you know may literally drive these people crazy? Is it ethical? When it comes down to it, I’m a great believer in taking responsibility for oneself–if you can’t handle getting abused on a World of Warcraft forum by some anonymous acne-pocked loser in his parents basement, you should probably just get off the computer and make an appointment with a therapist. But I think people have some responsibility for what they say and do to others, even on the internet. It’s a fine line (as most such dilemmas are). I’m totally into doing it “for the lulz”, but there’s no question that some of this stuff goes over that line, wherever it is.

And some of this stuff has real world consequences. The article talks about a woman who makes a living off of “virtual real estate” in Second Life–she’s an e-landlord or whatever. Being the target of griefing is costing her real US dollars. There’s a decent case that this is just the cost of doing business in the anarchy of an internet world (or maybe the cost of doing business anywhere people have freedom of speech). But the stakes are definitely higher than one-on-one ascii abuse, and it’s worth thinking about whether the response ought to be different.

As you can see from my rambling response, this piece really brings up a lot of interesting points. I haven’t even touched on all of them. I can’t recommend the article enough–it’s a really interesting look at this phenomenon (and is filled with hilarious anecdotes).

¹

When SL real estate magnate Anshe Chung announced she had accumulated more than $1 million in virtual assets and got her avatar’s picture splashed across the cover of BusinessWeek, the stage was set for a Second Life goondom’s spotlight moment: the interruption of a CNET interview with Chung by a procession of floating phalluses that danced out of thin air and across the stage.

And while we’re here, tell me you don’t find this completely awesome:

The Albion Park section of Second Life is generally a quiet place, a haven of whispering fir trees and babbling brooks set aside for those who “need to be alone to think, or want to chat privately.” But shortly after 5 pm Eastern time on November 16, an avatar appeared in the 3-D-graphical skies above this online sanctuary and proceeded to unleash a mass of undiluted digital jackassery. The avatar, whom witnesses would describe as an African-American male clad head to toe in gleaming red battle armor, detonated a device that instantly filled the air with 30-foot-wide tumbling blue cubes and gaping cartoon mouths. For several minutes the freakish objects rained down, immobilizing nearby players with code that forced them to either log off or watch their avatars endlessly text-shout Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Get to the choppaaaaaaa!” tagline from Predator.

That is just beautiful. I can’t stop picturing it.

Um, yeah. Good luck with that, CVS.

(Spoiler alert!) Ultimately, the woman in the article chose private practice, and this is the cute way the article describes it:

In mid-November, over beer with friends at a bar near the law campus, just off Capitol Hill, Roose-Snyder announces she has been scanning the Internet for condominiums in Chicago. Nothing too fancy. She’s looking for a two-bedroom place, near public transportation — maybe something with exposed brick walls? Besides, she says, not all the firm’s clients are profit-pumping corporations.

“My firm represents tons and tons of hospitals,” she says, explaining her leaning. “I consider that helping the public good.”

Her friend Shai Kalansky, 26, also a third-year, explains why he took a job at the corporate law firm where he worked during the summer. “I think about the people I met. I reflect on the experience. It’s about the people,” says Kalansky, clad in a dark hooded sweat shirt that bore the firm’s name.

“I really like that hoodie,” Roose-Snyder says.

Is anyone else getting a hint of Anakin Skywalker in that passage?

Now here’s the thing. I and my classmates face the same choice this year, and for those who are interested in non-profit or government work it can be a pretty frustrating situation.

Many firms make offers in September, expecting an answer by November; meanwhile, the low-paying public service jobs don’t get meted out until the spring. So unless you’re a seriously awesome candidate, you can’t really afford to hope that firm job offer will still be on the table in March or April. And, of course, you can’t know for sure that you’ll get a public service job, either. Meanwhile, half of your classmates have already accepted their offers and are spending all of their time drinking, relaxing, playing World of Warcraft, or whatever they want to do. How do you turn down a huge salary and an easy academic year when the alternative is so nebulous, risky, and (let’s not forget) un-lucrative?

On paper, it looks like a tough choice, weighted heavily toward the firms. But in practice, from what I’ve seen, for most people it’s not a choice at all. And I don’t mean that in a cynical, “lawyers have no souls” kind of way.

I think the article (and many others like it) are a little bit too judgmental of law students. While I understand the temptation to portray law students as money-hungry mercenaries who don’t care about anything but themselves, it’s not really fair (or at least not universally fair). When you graduate with $100k or more of debt, salary is important. When 90% of the job opportunities you hear about are big firm jobs, and applying for them is as easy as checking a box on a website, and you’re so busy with classwork that you don’t have time to think about filling out a form listing everywhere you’ve lived and worked in the last ten years, you end up applying for a lot of firm jobs. When you’re dead broke, and you know that a firm will pay for your bar exam fees and your moving costs at the end of the year, it starts to look like a much better alternative to going even deeper into debt.

The Post’s Andrew Cohen, a columnist who writes about legal issues (and a BU alum!), put up a blog post about it as well, in which he makes the very welcome point that blaming law students for this is pretty myopic. As he notes, the circumstances that lead to this result are in the hands of law school administrators, law firms, big firm customers, and others. The whole damn system’s out of order! As a step toward ameliorating that, Cohen recommends that all law students be required to do 2 years of public interest work before being unleashed upon the big firm ecosystem. While I think that’s a bit unrealistic, I do think he’s on the right track.

It would be one thing if these low-paying government jobs were easy to get, but most of them are highly competitive–probably more competitive than the firm jobs are. When you’re trying to make the decision, everything is stacked against opting for a public interest job.

The entire system, from signing up for the LSAT on, is built to channel law students into the big firm world. When you’re deeply in debt, and every email you get from your career development office is about big firm jobs, and everyone you know is pushing themselves to get the best grades and the best summer jobs so they can get the best firm jobs, and accepting an offer means your last year of law school is a cakewalk, and you have to give up on a sure thing just to take the chance at getting a public interest job, and everything else… it’s not a choice at all. It’s an inevitability.

I’m not sure how to fix this–there’s so much money in the business of law that it seems inevitable. And despite Cohen’s assertion that law schools are graduating too many students, there don’t seem to be enough to go around: witness the ridiculous increase in starting salaries at firms, a response to a seller’s market. The biggest problem as I see it, though, is that the public interest job market is the opposite. There are too few jobs for too many interested candidates, so the employers offer less money and introduce additional hurdles (like the later decision time for offers) to weed out all but the most passionate applicants. So people like the subject of the article end up pushed toward a job they are, at best, ambivalent about.

That being said, it doesn’t make much sense to me that firms are so hard-up for good applicants, while public interest jobs seem so hard to get. Maybe it’s just a problem of perception–if a law student put the same amount of time and effort in pursuing a public interest job, it might be no more difficult to get. But the fact that my perception is otherwise suggests that, if nothing else, there’s a problem of communication somewhere in the pipeline.

Ultimately, I’m not even sure this is a problem. While a crapload of young lawyers start out taking firm jobs, many of them move on to something else fairly quickly (partly because law firms more or less kick them out after a few years). And although Cohen makes a lot of good points in his column, the fact remains that law firms need somebody to do the drudgery–document review, routine research, and other basic legal tasks–and that work would be a waste of an experienced associate’s time (not to mention the fact that it would be billed for more money if an experienced lawyer were doing it). It may well be that a few years’ “indentured servitude” to a big firm is a good thing for everyone involved.

In a perfect world, everyone would get paid big firm money to do public interest work. But, for many reasons, this isn’t a perfect world. If it were, we wouldn’t have lawyers at all.

Well that’s interesting. Apparently you can bring them a photograph of yourself as you actually appear, and then they’ll “tweak” it so it looks like you, but BETTER.

Now let’s see what things CVS thinks people might find unsightly enough to have removed from their photos:

So okay. Elements of Ugliness:

• Glasses
• Braces
• Freckles
• Blemishes
• Tattoos
• Fatness (Face or Body)
• More!

Terrific. Now I know which things about myself to hate (even the tattoos I presumably got to make myself look that way!).

That’s great, but it’s a little hard to get the central point of this service.

Ah, now I see. A few simple changes and–bam! Your photograph rules.

I think we can all agree that CVS, by making our photographs more attractive, is doing a great thing for America. Of course, there are some problems. Like, for example, I’m not a big fan of my face. It’s sort of homely and when I have a beard in certain lights it looks a bit “terroristy.” I’d like CVS to offer me the ability to replace my face with Matt Damon’s, or Robert Goulet’s (RIP). And in light of our current Middle East Conflict, I’d really like to be able to paste an American flag into all of my photos–in the background, or maybe as a lapel pin, or something like that.

Here’s a mockup of what I mean:

Now we’re talking. What a handsome, patriotic guy I now am! Thanks, CVS, for giving me the courage to make my photos depict the guy I really am, in my own mind!

Apple knew it could get you to pay more. It set its price accordingly. Now it has lowered prices to make money off of other people who weren’t willing to pay before. That’s how business works, especially the high-margin business of consumer electronics.

You paid an extra $200 to have a cool toy a couple of months earlier than everyone else. Get over it.

The Post website managers feel the need to increase their page view stats. I get that. They break up all their articles into multiple pages (with multiple paying advertisers represented on each page), so that people get stuck loading a new page 3 or 4 times just to read an 800 word article. This is, in a word, short-sighted. They’re alienating their readers at a time that they really can’t afford to do so. I know what they would say in response–”all the major newspaper sites do it! (except for those jerks at the Wall Street Journal)”–but it’s just a matter of time, WashingtonPost.com. Somebody in charge of a big paper will get a clue, sooner or later, and put together a website putting its readers ahead of its advertisers. And that website will get more daily users, more links from blogs, and ultimately more (wait for it…) page views.

But I’m not really here to talk about that. It’s true that everybody does it, and I wouldn’t bother to single the Post out for it. I’d like to address a more pernicious, obnoxious “feature” of their home page. Here’s how it works:

1. A user navigates to http://www.washingtonpost.com/, either manually or by setting it as their home page (which is what I have done for about 8 years now).
2. That user leaves the page idle for, I don’t know, let’s be generous and call it 10 minutes.
3. The user notices that, for some reason, the little icon next to the URL box is moving–signaling that the browser is loading a page. This is strange because, the user knows, that page has already fully loaded.
4. Hmmm, everything looks the same. But wait–the URL is different! Now it’s http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=true!

And you can probably figure out what’s going on–the Post home page automatically reloads every few minutes, increasing their page view stats (and, presumably, their advertising profits).

There’s an argument that this benefits readers, too–as news develops, it’s automatically reflected in the next page load–but this argument does not satisfy me. The Post website is not exactly quick-loading. It’s stuffed to the gills with flash video, flash audio, a plethora of ads (of course), and quite a bit of actual news content as well. All this data takes a while to load in my browser–as much as 30 or 40 seconds, depending on my connection. So it’s not unusual for me to come back to my computer and find the browser stalled in the middle of loading the site. But wait, it gets worse! Because sometimes when I come back, the page is already loaded. So I start scrolling down, skimming headlines, looking for something to read. And I find it. And as I go to click on it… you already know what I’m about to say. The page refreshes. And I’m stuck waiting for it to finish loading before I can click on the link I had targeted. More than that, though, because when the page refreshes it resets my focus to the top of the screen. So I have to scroll down all over again.

Some of you may have noted that the URL to the refreshing page is actually just the standard URL with “?reload=true” appended. And you may have reached the reasonable conclusion, as I did, that there may be a workaround. Why not just set your home page to http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false, you ask? I’ll tell you why. This is my favorite part of the whole saga, actually, because it is so surreal. It’s like a Dali painting. After 10 minutes, the http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false page reloads!!!! Now, guess what the URL is on the reloaded page. It’s really great–the height of absurdity. The URL on the reloaded page is…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false&reload=true.

Let me just say it again:

Wow. I mean, wow. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for how this works. Here’s what I came up with:

You meet a man and talk to him for a while and suddenly he punches you in the face and knocks you out cold. When you wake up, he’s sitting next to you and you’re wearing a shirt that says “Punch Me”. Lying on the ground you see a shirt that says “Don’t Punch Me”. Before he has a chance to punch you again, you take off the “Punch Me” shirt and put on the “Don’t Punch Me” shirt. A few minutes later, he punches you in the face and knocks you out cold. When you wake up, you’re wearing the “Punch Me” shirt on top of the “Don’t Punch Me” shirt.

Just to be clear, in that analogy, the Washington Post is the one repeatedly punching you in the face.

Obviously, I feel this is a mistake. It’s bad enough to make the stupid reloading behavior a default, but it’s unbearably stupid to provide the opportunity to make a choice and not actually honor that choice.

While we’re here, I wish the Post wouldn’t put links to stories in flash (e.g., that little ribbon of links in the middle of the home page)–I like to open links in new tabs in my browser, and that doesn’t work when I click on a flash object. Which means that I end up having to click on the story, then navigate back to the main website, wait for it to load, and go through this all over again. That’s poor design, and rude to readers.

This is a tough time for newspapers everywhere. I know that. But the only way out of it is to act with readers in mind. Don’t bend over backwards to make the user experience miserable, frustrating, confusing, and ugly–not just to raise a superficial stat that doesn’t actually reflect an increase in readership. It may benefit you in the short term, but in the long term it fosters in your readers a feeling that you think you’re doing them a favor. You’re not–you’re making money off of them, and they know it. So if you want to keep doing so, you’ll have to start treating them with appreciation and consideration. Else, you’ll find yourself in even more dire straits–the proud publisher of an advertiser-friendly website with a dearth of readers. Good luck turning a profit on that.

In the mean time, I’m on the lookout for a new home page. Any suggestions?

And that’s it. No more stupid videos advertising “Who’s Now” or WNBA broadcasts or Steven A. Smith’s newest show, “Spittin’ Mad With Steven A. (Brought to You by Cheetos)”. Enjoy.

^* ESPN, you really need to find a way to turn this off by default. Everyone hates it. Most of us visit your site from work, you know? We can’t have this nonsense.

And for that matter, why doesn’t anyone have DVDs that skip all those stupid copying warning messages? I would be absolutely shocked if they have any positive effect on piracy. Just like every other aspect of “copy protection,” it inconveniences honest consumers while doing absolutely nothing to slow down pirates.

Damn it all.

I could really go for a Strawberry-Kiwi Crystal Pepsi ™ right now.

This is totally awesome news for law-abiding music buyers who have been treated like criminal garbage for years. And now that the door has been meaningfully opened, there seems to be no way to shut it, or even to keep it from swinging wide open. I’ll be shocked if all online music isn’t available without DRM by this time next year.

Like I said, this is really good news. But I’m writing a massive academic paper about DRM in online media sales. And it’s due in a week. CURSES.

Couldn’t you guys have just saved the announcement for May?

Our tale begins around 1688, when Edward Lloyd opened a small coffee house in London. Though no Starbucks, his shop was destined to achieve worldwide fame because of the commercial activities of its clientele – shipowners, merchants and venturesome British capitalists. As these parties sipped Edward’s brew, they began to write contracts transferring the risk of a disaster at sea from the owners of ships and their cargo to the capitalists, who wagered that a given voyage would be completed without incident. These capitalists eventually became known as “underwriters at Lloyd’s.”

Though many people believe Lloyd’s to be an insurance company, that is not the case. It is instead a place where many member-insurers transact business, just as they did centuries ago.

Over time, the underwriters solicited passive investors to join in syndicates. Additionally, the business broadened beyond marine risks into every imaginable form of insurance, including exotic coverages that spread the fame of Lloyd’s far and wide. The underwriters left the coffee house, found grander quarters and formalized some rules of association. And those persons who passively backed the underwriters became known as “names.”

Eventually, the names came to include many thousands of people from around the world, who joined expecting to pick up some extra change without effort or serious risk. True, prospective names were always solemnly told that they would have unlimited and everlasting liability for the consequences of their syndicate’s underwriting – “down to the last cufflink,” as the quaint description went. But that warning came to be viewed as perfunctory. Three hundred years of retained cufflinks acted as a powerful sedative to the names poised to sign up.

Then came asbestos. When its prospective costs were added to the tidal wave of environmental and product claims that surfaced in the 1980s, Lloyd’s began to implode. Policies written decades earlier – and largely forgotten about – were developing huge losses. No one could intelligently estimate their total, but it was certain to be many tens of billions of dollars. The specter of unending and unlimited losses terrified existing names and scared away prospects. Many names opted for bankruptcy; some even chose suicide.

From these shambles, there came a desperate effort to resuscitate Lloyd’s. In 1996, the powers that be at the institution allotted £11.1 billion to a new company, Equitas, and made it responsible for paying all claims on policies written before 1993. In effect, this plan pooled the misery of the many syndicates in trouble. Of course, the money allotted could prove to be insufficient – and if that happened, the names remained liable for the shortfall.

But the new plan, by concentrating all of the liabilities in one place, had the advantage of eliminating much of the costly intramural squabbling that went on among syndicates. Moreover, the pooling allowed claims evaluation, negotiation and litigation to be handled more intelligently than had been the case previously. Equitas embraced Ben Franklin’s thinking: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall hang separately.”

That’s two of the letter’s twenty-one pages. I encourage you to read the rest.

[Gulfstream]

I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time. This is impossible with Watch Now. To fast-forward, you grab the slider and drag it to the right, then wait. It’s more like teleporting than running at high speed.

Um, yeah. Most people rent movies to, you know, watch them–not just to get the Cliff’s Notes version. (This also goes a long way to explain why he doesn’t have a problem with the “sub-DVD” image quality–he isn’t watching movies for anything but the dialogue and plot, so who cares how it looks?)

On the other hand, he definitely has a point here:

Conceptually, Watch Now is the perfect vessel for instant movie gratification. Ever rent, say, Street Fighter Alpha and discover that it’s not the modern classic your “friend” promised? With Watch Now, you can watch two minutes and abandon ship. You’ll still have 17 hours minus 58 minutes of watching time to go. So, in between checking sports scores and reading blogs, you’ll be able to catch up on old episodes of that new hit TV show everyone’s raving about.

That is a fair criticism–it is really annoying when a Netflix rental is a dud, especially when it’s a “classic.” Many’s the time I’ve watched 10 minutes of a movie and then let the DVD sit around for months because I didn’t want to watch the rest but didn’t want to feel guilty about returning it unwatched. That’s what economists call “dumb.”

However, I’ve had Watch Now for a month or two now, and aside from taking a moment to try it out I haven’t used it at all. I haven’t even considered it. I’m pretty busy and can’t even keep up with my Netflix DVD stream–I’m averaging 1 or 2 discs a week, which is not that great. But when I have time to watch something, I’m watching the DVDs, for several reasons (at :

• I have a sweet TV. I spent too much money on it, but now that it’s here I want to use it. And although I could, technically, watch Watch Now movies on it, I wouldn’t consider it. The resolution sucks, and I’d have to use my keyboard/mouse to play, pause, fast forward, rewind, etc. But at the same time, watching things on my monitor isn’t ideal either. Watching short youtube vids is one thing, but sitting in a deskchair staring at a blurry movie on a screen 18 inches in front of you for two hours is another. It might be okay for watching an episode or two of a tv show, though–which leads us to…
• Watch Now selection is a joke. This was the first thing I noticed when I checked out the service. You can’t go online with a movie in mind, because they barely have any movies online. You have to just browse through what they’ve got and hope you find something that piques your interest. Not ideal. As part of his review, Salam notes “I can honestly say, however, that in the 12 or so hours I’ve spent watching Netflix’s streaming offerings, I’ve seen nothing I would pay to see.” Yikes! This will probably improve in coming months, but until they reach some critical mass of availability it’ll be hard to get me too interested.
• Watch Now only works on PCs running Windows, via Internet Explorer. This isn’t a huge deal for me but it is annoying. I use Firefox, not Internet Explorer, so I’ve got to go just slightly out of my way to access the service. And it turns out that “just slightly” is the smallest amount too great to get me to go out of my way. Of course, for lots of people (linux/OS X users) it’s not just an annoyance–it’s a complete barrier to use. Much like the selection issue, this will probably sort itself out soon (well, I’d guess that linux users are just plain out of luck as usual). Who knows if it’ll make any real difference, though.

It sounds from the review like Salam would be more or less happy if the service just had better content selection. But I don’t think most people would feel that way. Who wants to watch a low-res (and often 4:3 rather than widescreen) movie with no special features on their computer screen in an age of high definition and director’s commentary? Not I. And as long as the average person’s bandwidth is limited to DSL/cable, Netflix won’t be able to significantly improve image quality.

But that’s not to say that there’s no place for Watch Now. The first thing they got right is the price (it’s free, or rather its cost is part of your monthly fee for the DVD rental service). This means that if you’re stuck in a hotel or an airport or a library or a coffeeshop (or anywhere with internet service) with an hour or two to kill, you can just tune into Watch Now and watch the minutes melt away. What a great bonus feature! Netflix would be wise to market it this way, as an extra perk that comes with membership, rather than disappoint users who expect easy instant access to DVD-quality movies on their laptops.