Jail time for downloading music?

    Gene Simmons. I don’t like his music, and apparently I really dislike his view of the business also. On the latest Condé Nast Portfolio, his interview includes some pretty appalling stuff. When talking about downloading music, his comments include:

    ..my sense is a trillion dollars of lost income.
    [..]
    What’s missing is repercussions for bad behavior. Jail time, taking peoples’ homes, cars. I mean legitimate hardcore penalties for theft.
    [..]
    That means that there are possibly trillions of dollars which can be collected.

    Trillions of dollars my ass.. news flash, Gene: the entire music industry yearly revenue is about 30 billion euros. For a businessman to talk about trillions in lost revenue is pretty pathetic arithmetic.

    The world and its value chains are changing. We have been ironing out and eliminating inefficiencies from many industries for decades now, and it’s about time the music industry got on with that, too. Quit whining and adapt or die. You could start by making better music.

How we love biofuels … somewhere else

    At the Helsinki airport, ST1 fuel trucks are decorated with big slogans proclaiming “Bioenergy is our passion”. Curiously enough, these trucks do not carry an ounce of biofuels as such a thing is not in use for jet fuels.
    Besides, it’s a very questionable strategy for any company to promote their allegiance to first-generation biofuels these days.

The things you’ll do with your phone 15 years from now..

    While at the airport the other day, I was struck by some interesting behavior in phone usage; a 10-year-old was sporting a high-end phone, the Nokia N82. That alone might be strange in some countries, but in Finland it’s nothing unusual.
    What he did with it was more interesting; he used the Nokia Barcode Reader and tried to scan the 2D barcode on his printed e-ticket. Of course, nothing happened.
    But that made me think – why is it “of course” nothing happened? Why couldn’t something happen? The more I thought about it, the more I became something could’ve and should’ve happened. If only enough of the pieces were in place, he could’ve – and in my opinion, should’ve – been able to:
  • See the real-time departures information as to whether his plane is on time
  • See the seat map of the plane and the seat assigned to him
  • See the weather forecast at the arrival point for when the plane is due to arrive
  • Be offered some games for download while he still could, so that the flight wouldn’t be so boring
    Of course, passengers with other interests could be offered countless other things like technical details of the aircraft they’re about to board, crew names & profiles and links whatever blogs they maintain, locations of passengers who’ve tagged themselves as willing to socialize during the flight and so on and on.
    I would’ve welcomed any or all of these things, but did it occur to me to try to scan the barcode? No, because I knew it wouldn’t do anything. But seeing someone try it made me realize that it should do something.