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organizational behavior

vocalist

ok, you might not be a terrorist if you forget to check your marshmallows, but i guess this is the police-state that keeps us all safe from the fish….

Marshmallow Bust Haunts Woman on Cruise

A teacher’s aide who forgot to put away her marshmallows and hot chocolate at Yellowstone National Park last year was taken from her cruise ship cabin in handcuffs and hauled before a judge Friday, accused of failing to pay the year-old fine.

Hope Clarke, 32, crying and in leg shackles, told the judge she was rousted at 6:30 a.m. by federal agents after the ship returned to Miami from Mexico. She insisted that she had been required to pay the $50 fine before she could leave Yellowstone, which has strict rules about food storage to prevent wildlife from eating human food.

…

U.S. Magistrate Judge John O’Sullivan, who had a copy of a citation indicating the fine had been paid, apologized to Clarke, who spent nearly nine hours in detention, and demanded that the U.S. attorney’s office determine what went wrong.

i don’t care what agency is following up what arrest warrant with bad paper – a delinquent $50 fine does not warrant (ahem) 9 hours of detention.

We were acting on what we believed was accurate information

i feel better already.

update (05:20): my mistake. i got the evildoers confused. the image is khalid shaikh mohammed. the first alternative source i found for the image had it mis-identified. i still think the photo needs a name in the caption. this is what i get for reading the wires and posting on the blog while pushing a deadline 🙂

next to the banner headline, “9/11 Plot Reportedly Hatched in 1996” and “Mastermind Says He Pitched Plot That Culminated in 9/11 Attacks to Osama Bin Laden in 1996, ” abc news is running a photo of what appears to be saddam hussein.

see it yourself here – at least until it’s corrected or pulled, in which case you can see a screen capture here:

i have to assume this is an associated press issue, since it’s an ap photo and an ap story, but really… you’d think someone would catch this, particularly during the week that the question about the iraq-al qaida connection is so prominent in the news. in any case, it’s just a little detail we managed to catch and put on the record for you…

a while ago, i dropped this here in the hopes that it would start something… it didn’t start much.

maybe this time…

The Fight of Our Lives, Bill Moyers [alternet]

The rich have the right to buy more homes than anyone else. They have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more gizmos than anyone else, more clothes and vacations than anyone else. But they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.

[emphasis is not mine – that’s in the original]

update (2004.06.18 23:11): this same quote appears on metafilter. hmm. maybe something will happen this time. following the lead from the comments there, i thought it worth adding this too….

The Fight of Our Lives, Bill Moyers [alternet]

Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

revisiting a brief discussion we had several months ago, frequent meta-roj blogologue contributor barry ritholtz is fed up, and he’s not going to browse there anymore.

it’s a thread that’s been woven through the meta-roj blog… sometimes we bounce it off the television, and sometimes the recording industry and often woven tightly with the theme of active vs. passive “consumption” (and it’s always related to spam).

barry’s got a website that he visits, regularly, but has apparently become increasingly annoying. today, the relationship is over, and the site in question is going to have to either a) live with losing barry, or b) jump through flaming hoops to win him back. i’m betting on the former. i’m also betting that they have about the same attitude as sunncomm – “We hear from less than half of one percent of people…” – and they’re missing the big picture (to borrow a phrase).

to succeed in this vast universe of options, you have to be useful without being annoying. google’s done a good job with that, and despite their occasional flirtation with evil, they do self-correct rapidly.

i’ve got my own annoying-google story from sometime around 2000 – my habit then (before the advent of the tabbed browser) was to leave several browser windows in the background on the desktop available for quick access – and google was an obvious choice. then google decided to add a little bit of code to their page that would a) refresh the page every few minutes and b) bring the page “to the top.” you can imagine this was excessively annoying to have the google search page pop forward at the most inopportune times, like when i’m writing something in another application and end up searching for “oice).” anyway, i complained (i was one of the tiny percent that they heard from, i didn’t want them to take my google away) and i’m sure several other people did too. i’m equally sure that many people did not. google listened to the tiny percent, and the annoyance vanished within days.

true geeks among us might try to make the case that barry’s problem is with internet explorer and not with the site in question – and they might be right. it’s entirely possible that barry’s better approach may be to switch browsers and not websites, but the site still got the blame. nobody (not even barry) should have to jump through hoops (even simple hoops) to keep a company from annoying them, and companies better find that religion.

advantage: customer.

several months ago, in meatspace (unfortunately), i made a comment that the bush administration had so polarized the world that everyone now had a vested interest in the upcoming election – and i said something to the effect that i thought we’d see a large number of “october surprises” probably starting well before october.

it’s hard to draw a line in the moving political sands, but the breaking news this morning is that Russia ‘warned U.S. about Saddam’ [cnn]. the story is that saddam was planning terrorist attacks on united states interests both in the united states and abroad.

maybe that’s the first surprise. maybe we’ve already seen a few from interested parties around the world. anyway, since i was just reminded that i made the comment, i thought i should dump it here too. i expect all kinds of interesting developments this year as individuals and groups with influence and resources push for or against a particular outcome in november.

Annan attacks US immunity move

I think in this circumstance it would be unwise to press for an exemption, and it would be even more unwise on the part of the Security Council to grant it. It would discredit the Council and the United Nations, which stands for the primacy of rule of law. That blanket exemption is wrong.

contraband is, in one definition, goods or merchandise whose importation, exportation, or possession is forbidden, which gives me a nice, fat ironic platform to sit myself upon.

i last toyed with sunncomm back in november as a sort of brief wrap-up to a series of posts on the drm-hackjob that is the sunncomm cd protection technology (1, 2, 3, 4).

with cory’s piece on drm fresh in my mind and some news about the first sunncomm-drm-protected #1 cd in the united states (“contraband” from velvet revolver), i thought it was time to take a bit of a break from the stupid-government-tricks phase here at meta-roj and jump back into the business-of-music stuff a bit.

since we last explored sunncomm, they have changed their name (now sunncomm international as opposed to sunncomm technologies) and acquired dark noise technologies in an attempt to expand their cd-protection regime to cover the analog hole. they’ve also apparently learned several lessons from the famous shift-key debacle – their “marketing and sales arm” is called quiettiger now. the quieter, the better, no doubt. they’ve also inked deals with emi and a few other companies.

now, i haven’t actually worked the darknoise gimmick, and i don’t even know if it’s present on the velvet revolver cd, but this is what they have to say about thier widget:

winston keech of darknoise, in stereophile

The technology, called ‘Q-Spoiler’, works by encoding the original digital audio file with a unique hidden signal. The signal is embedded in the audio master and becomes an indelible part of the actual audio file in addition to aiding in subsequent origin identification. Should the original CD be copied, so, too, is the hidden signal and identification ‘tag.’ Unless [it is] illegally invoked, the listener is unaware of the hidden signal’s presence. Attempts to illegally copy the protected audio using analog recording devices, analog-to-digital converters, or psychoacoustic compression codes, such as MP3, will invoke the hidden signal which transforms to become audible within the range of human hearing, thus ruining the unauthorized copy

we’ve discussed drm as “damage” (with another nod to kevin), but this is literally damaging the audio in the hope of making drm stick.

drm won’t stick.

cory explains just how drm is bad mojo. kevin’s said drm destroys value for a long time. even steve jobs knows about the future of drm (since then, apple has pretty much lost that religion). and i guess you know by now that i agree. in fact, one of the main reasons i think there is a lot of life left in the cd format is because it’s from an age of innocence where decent digital technology was unencumbered by silly drm overhead. the basic cd is just that – basic. no region-coding, no shift-key happening, no software-installing – it’s just a 12 centimeter chunk of polycarbonate that happens to hold music and works in billions of gadgets.

perhaps darknoise will work in the short-term because the sound of current-generation cd’s is simply awful, and the darknoise noise won’t sound any worse than the clipped-off transients the recording industry is imposing on us all. perhaps it’s enugh to save sunncomm from oblivion (their stock price has popped up to 16 cents or so with all the good news), but fundamentally, they’re annoying consumers. they apparently believe that annoying just a small percentage of customers is a legitimate tradeoff in this business model:

peter jacobs, sunncomm ceo [news.com]

We hear from less than half of one percent of people who have the Velvet Revolver disc. Most of those questions are related to getting the songs onto an iPod.

billboard reports that the contraband package sold 256,000 units in its first week. half of one percent of 256,000 is 1280. worse, the people who are annoyed or inconvenienced by this drm wrapper might just be the ones with the most influence – brandon fuller, shane cartmill, tom johnson, eric olsen and others will be talking about this for a while.

i hope sunncomm has their call center pumped up to handle the volume as the rest of the buyers face interesting questions about why their cd doesn’t do what they thought it should do. there’s a label on the package that says the cd is “protected against unauthorized duplication” – so some people might not be buying. they’ll never know how the release could’ve done if it weren’t wrapped in drm – i’m quite sure the music is already “out on the net” – anyone with a mac and an internet connection didn’t even have to hold the shift key.

Shane Cartmill

The first test was to rip the CD into AAC format in iTunes for transfer to my iPod. It worked flawlessly just like any other CD. Next I popped the CD into my trusty Mac, opened Toast and clicked copy. Five minutes later I had a perfect reproduction of the disc. In the words of Johnny Bench in the old Krylon Paint commercials, “no runs, no drips, no errors.” Finally, I tested it in every CD device I owned – seven total. The disc played fine at home, in the computer, on the road and in the portable CD devices.

the bigger issue is the relative value of the drm-wrapped polycarbonate version, which is conveniently addressed elsewhere in the same post:

Shane Cartmill

What angered me is that iTunes offers Contraband for $9.99 and I can burn it 7 times and transfer it to unlimited iPods. But purchasing the actual disc for four dollars more gave me more restrictions.

i’m not railing against drm because i’m pro-consumer, or pro-music-pirate or even pro-boston-strangler. to me, it’s a fairly simple business case. licensing the drm technology increases the cost of each unit, and having the drm wrapper on the cd can only negatively impact unit sales (short and long term), so i don’t understand why this industry is so interested in this stuff.