Friday, November 14, 2003
Here's a quote taken from a short interview with Mark Cuban about Cuban's acquisition of Landmark Theatres.
Q: Are you concerned about piracy in movie theaters?
A: Not one bit. If we can't compete with some guy sneaking a camera into the theater, or a blurry, encoded, postage stamp-sized file, then please - just shoot us.
This seems like a fairly obvious statement to me. My question is this, "Why can some people see issues like this so clearly and yet the industry in general is ready to waste hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to chase this imaginary threat?"
Are these types of worries necessary speed bumps that slow the pace of progress long enough for everyone to adjust or is it simply what it seems to be, a bunch of short sighted assholes bitching and moaning about a problem that initially exists only in their mind until they spend it into reality in the name of proactively challenging an absurd threat.
4:33:44 PM
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Today could have been a bad day... probably should have been a bad day...
I'm very behind in the stuff that I want to be doing.
I'm still out of work/still don't have even the hint of a lead after nearly a year (to be fair there were a couple of near misses... sort of).
I can't help but spend a lot of brain power thinking about how my life is being impacted by the lack of desire, commitment to excellence, good faith and good will of the people around me, from my landlord to past and potential future employers to my cable company, manufacturers, fast food outfits/employees, etc.
As it turns out, I'm a pretty miserable guy.
And I can't do anything about it because I think I'm right and I'm not ready to give up being right... because it's all I have left.
Anyway, today should have been just another miserable day but I got a new Wired magazine today so it's a good day afterall.
I love Wired magazine. It never disappoints. Every single issue is full of the type of articles that are better than any paper or assignment I ever turned in at any level in school. It's amazing to me.
There's an interview in this month's issue with Bill Joy. It's a great interview because Bill Joy has great things to say. I disagree with Java (in what Universe exactly is java supposed to exist?) and agree with just about everything else.
Here are some quotes. I highly recommend that you get a subscription by the way.
Q: And yet you've been famously cool about Linux
A: Re-implementing what I designed in 1979 is not interesting to me personally. For kids who are 20 years younger than me, Linux is a great way to cut your teeth, It's a cultural phenomenon. Mac OS X is a rock-solid system that's beautifully designed. I much prefer it to Linux.
Q: What about the open source idea in general?
A: Open source is fine, but it doesn't take a worldwide community to create a great operating system... Now there's nothing wrong with letting people help, but opens ource doesn't assist the initial creative act.
Q: You did once say that we shouldn't "let the future just happen." Haven't laissez-faire and free markets won out over planned economies?
A: Our problem is no longer "going faster," getting to the future as fast as possible, but rather dealing with limits - limiting our own greed to avoid disaster in the environment and limiting what rogue individuals and states can do. Market mechanisms don't address these problems. Things that aren't accounted for in the cost equations - especially catastrophic events, the value of our survival - don't get dealt with.
Q: Are you any more at peace with what you see coming?
A: Not when the forces at play are so powerful that we have such strongly negative possible outcomes. Do we care whether we get a police state without civil liberties because the government's "protecting us" from terrorists? I think we do care. Are people paying enough attention to stop it? I don't think so.
Q: A cynic would say that your Wired story made noise but the result was you in an Audi ad with "Jini" and "Java" painted on your face.
A: As long as the Bush administration is in power, nothing's going to get done about any of this. The liability is going to get transferred to the next generation, like everything else.
Q: So much for progress.
A: What are we in such a hurry for?
Q: Easy for you to say. You live in Aspen.
A: We don't need a lot of economic growth to address the problem of the world's poor. We put subsustence farmers out of business because that's our choice. Clean water would do more to alleviate disease than high tech medicine.
4:20:19 PM
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