A quick question, because I don’t even know what the right answer is.

There’s a chance for doubled content between this and the other weblog. Stuff in which I am a bitter bucket of beans will always end up here, where it is expected and tolerated, while such attitude will not make an appearance on a weblog ostensibly associated with a product. But on the other hand, there’s stuff over there that might be interesting over here. Specifically, my entry just now where I was sent a manual someone paid $2,348.31 for for free.

I mean, that’s an interesting thing, but I feel like it punishes people who are subscribed to both weblogs to post the same content in two places. Am I wrong about this? Will we all just hit the “I read this crap” button and move on?

I’d mostly expected I was going to funnel all the text adventure and GET LAMP news over to Inventory and then leave all this weblog for Everything Else. I just ask all of you if that makes sense. Have at.

Travel this holiday sent me between Massachusetts and New York State.

In doing so, as is often the case, I end up at a diner somewhere along Interstate 84. I like diners and while they’ve done their part to cause a lot of the weight hardship of my various years (I love tuna melts), the environment and interesting consistencies of the diner world comfort me. So I enjoyed my usual meal of tuna melt and fries and grabbed a newspaper lying around.

The newspaper was small-town; aimed for the surrounding area with a very, very heavy reliance on the Associated Press newswires. Generally, there’s little in the realm of world or even state/country politics/events that a newspaper like this could possibly garner on its own, so it needs the same newswires everyone else does. Let’s set that situation aside.

The articles regarding local events centered around the common situations of deaths, births, marriages, city councils, art and charity, and reviews of upcoming or existing entertainment. I read this sort of stuff and I feel constricted, like suddenly being faced with a boring and toy-lacking childhood room or walking the now-much-smaller hallways of a long-since-graduated school. It is cute but I suffocate quickly.

I mostly bring up this experience because for the first time in what I guess is a long while, I happened to see the comics page of an actual newspaper. Here’s a scan of it:

What struck me immediately, which may or may not be obvious to some who have been reading the papers in the present day for some time, is how small they’ve shrunk the comics. In the case of this paper, they’ve reduced the comics to one-half the size of the paper, shoving the rest of the “entertaining” columns (horoscope, bridge, puzzles) into the remaining half.

Not only that, but the comics are distorted; if you see the images most ingrained in the average person’s mind of Peanuts or Cathy or Dilbert, you can absolutely see how they’re scrunched up, almost accordion style, to fit this lack of space.

The discussion of this situation is very tired and has gone on for some time; Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame was most famous for this, demanding as part of his contract that the size of his comics couldn’t be reduced. He walked away from the business in 1995 and hasn’t looked back, as far as I know. He was quite right; this is a pretty sad situation. What other less-obvious shortcuts is the average newspaper making?

In other news, this page includes an excellent lame joke involving the word “blog”:

I defer to the master in observing strangeness in this strip, but I do note that somehow this commentary is meant to be funny, and I must confess a strain between wanting the comic strips shown more respect, and strips like this that deserve none.

Well, it only took me about a week of using my other weblog under Wordpress’ environment to wonder what the hell I’m doing still under movable type. I mean, seriously. So yeah, expect this weblog to end up under that environment, be better handled, faster, have more flexibility, and all that.

The only big deal is making it so all the old postings, images and the rest link properly within the new software and for people coming in. To make that happen will require at least some preparation, some process in flipping it over, and then a lot of testing. I hope it will go relatively smoothly.

Just a warning about this impending craziness. I considered doing this some time ago, but now it’s quite obvious it’s the way to go.

Most people who visit me for the first time walk into my office where I do most of my work for the websites and projects and they stop dead because they are confronted with The Wall.

The Wall is this collection of racks that take up a full side of my office. Where most people might have a couple shelves and a desk and some on-tap books and materials, I have this gigantic goddamn tsunami of papers, equipment and media going up and down the horribly-expanded enclosed deck that I took over when I moved into the house. Here’s some shots of it most recently:

As important as the editing for GET LAMP is doing the final roundup of images, books, papers, boxes and other material related to text adventures, all preparing for what’s called a second-unit shot set coming in a couple weeks. This will be where I back up statements or references by people with images of what they’re talking about. A person will reference the book and you’ll see the book. A map will be mentioned and you’ll see a map. That’s the easy way to put it.

A bunch of stuff streams into my house, stuff which sometimes asks for attention but doesn’t get it, instead ending up on a to-do pile and then the to-do piles get combined into should-really-do pile and then a bunch of should-really-do piles end up in some sort of mega-meta-super-plus-4000 mecha-pile that makes my room look like I died in it somewhere. So part of this effort was to get a handle on it.

Some papers are just obviously mementos or older artifacts; those are bagged into little plastic pouches and prepared for archiving. (In the future I will then take out all archived items of a certain nature and do something with them; or someone beyond me will.) Others are in need of scanning or being handled in some transcriptive manner. Others are just in the room because I like having them around. It ranges.

There are still pockets of stuff in this room that will get yet another sorting, and I am sure I will discover many things of the “huh” variety – as you might surmise from the photos, I have an energy drink can collection which needs a more formal presentation environment and I have a few plastic bins of papers which should be sorted through and given the bag treatment. But I will get it all, I promise, and maybe a few people waiting months for me to get back to them will suddenly find themselves with e-mail or webpages. We can only hope.

The Wall looks more imposing than it is; it just makes sense to have this X-Y outlook on my stuff and as time goes by it’s helped me keep track of a lot more than I’d have done otherwise.

And because every home tour needs a sudden celebrity walkthrough, here’s Socks, the most popular cat on twitter. Hey there, little guy.

Socks just broke 3,500 followers on twitter, which is pretty crazy in itself, but I think the topper is that he is now being followed on twitter by his own vet. That cat’s going to need his own wing in the house to keep track of all his groupies and hangers-on. I hope he remembers me when he’s riding around in his cat limo sipping catnip and juice.

If you live in the Boston area and have this burning desire to hang out with me, I’m at a meet-and-greet what’s-up-dilly-o event on the weekend: Infomation Superhighway Two.

Saturday November 29, 2008  at 8:00pm
Berkman Squared
50 Church Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
Category: Social
Harvard Free Culture, ROFLCon, and Public Radio Exchange Proudly Present...

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY TWO
A Gathering Of Boston Tech
November 29th, 2008, 8:00 PM - 12:00
Berkman Squared, 50 Church Street, Cambridge MA

Boston is full of cool Internet people. Why aren't they meeting each other?

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY is Boston's monthly party gathering hackers,
activists, artists, designers,  nonprofits, startups, academics and general
geekery to hang out and connect with one another.

No agenda, no "networking," no presentations. Just beverages, food,
ideas and cool people.

Best of all the price is free, just like your courtesy black helicopter flight
to A Secure Undisclosed Location  This time: come out and meet Boston's
Secret Masters of Hidden Hackspace,  Homebrew Mad Science, and Cyber
Revolution Also: hear about our scheme to rent a decommissioned missile silo.
And how you can too, on less than $10 bucks a month. (No, seriously).

With Featured Guests and Organizations:

*Jason Bobe, DIYBio
*Meredith Garniss and Andrew Sempere, Willoughby and Baltic
*Alex Hornstein, NUBLabs, FabLab
*David Weinberger, Joho the Blog, The Berkman Center For Internet and Society
*Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange
*Jason Scott, TextFiles
*Matt Lee, The Free Software Foundation

Also Sponsored By Information Superhighway Alumni:
Beth Coleman and Kevin Driscoll (CMS), Mel Chua (OLPC),
Steve Garfield (Founder, Boston Media Makers), Nate Aune,
Brian Del Vecchio and Jon Pierce (Betahouse), Brett Stilwell
(Pecha Kucha Boston)

The second in a planned four volume comic series called Wizzywig has arrived. I reviewed the first volume in the series back in January, and I gave it good marks. I see no reason, looking back, to change my opinion.

The positives of the first volume remain in the second one. This is a fun little book with short vignettes in the life of a hacker named Kevin Phenicle, alias “Boingthump”, which skips back and forth through various times in the kid’s life with great zest and almost random stopping points. Random access, if you will. The stories are not meant to be little comic-strip jokes, and while I shy away from the term “graphic novel” until I see all four volumes completed, there’s definitely a story emerging from the strips, pieces left in the first book falling into place in the second. Who can complain about that?

As I mentioned before, this book uses history as ingredients in a stew; it is without a doubt historical fiction, although the events it pulls together are often from reality; I recognize fleeting glimpses of names, places, actions and materials that I know from my own bits of historical research. To point at something and go “that guy didn’t do that” or “the original event cost $50 instead of hundreds of dollars” is missing the point to the extreme. When you piece together these stories, they really do give a sense of living in the dawn of the home computer age up through the big commercialization of home computers and the wave of hype that infected the world in the 1990s, both about computers and about hackers.

Piskor is basically functioning in a vacuum here; I can’t think of anyone drawing on this period like this, combining events that happened to teenagers like myself or other contemporaries and then making them into almost Grimm Brothers fairy tales about life. I can’t speak for someone who didn’t live through the events being referenced, but I get a sense that if you had an interest in that time period, this collection of stories is invaluable for giving a sense of the exploration, personalities, emotional peaks and crushing lows of the whole endeavor of hacking, phreaking and other “underground” activity.

Go ahead and read the first half of the book online. Ed is astoundingly generous with his craft, sharing it along the way and letting people check stuff out. You’ll see what I’m getting at; these are just fun little works.

This one has a lot more in the way of bulletin board system history, so it is naturally close to my heart. Seriously, if you think a comic that has ruminations on the experience of using a BBS will ever get a bad mark from me, you’re deluded:

What I’m saying is, if you got the first one, get the second one. And then, like me, wait eagerly for the third and fourth.

Hooray, Bring on the Pain is now a series.

I originally gave a list of places I was writing to or looking into or otherwise interacting with to do the next generation of BBS Documentary availability. Preferably digital distribution, which I count cable/satellite in as well as radio (?) or anything else where I, personally, am not sending out copies for people, but they are getting it somewhere and I’m making some small amount of bucks at. The list has expanded and there’s no point in listing a bunch of “I’m gonna” bullet points when I’d much rather list some “I did” bullet points.

But if possible, I’d like to occasionally touch on some learned or re-learned wisdom on my little journey, because it truly is about the journey and not the destination in this case. I already “got there” when I finished the BBS Documentary, the rest of this is sweet, delicious, digital gravy. So let’s talk about subjects that I hope inspire others.

I can’t fully explain why I have this need, once I’ve done stuff or gotten well along on something, to turn around and shout to people what I just did and what I learned. I am sure at least part of it is that on multiple occasions in my past, I relied on someone else laying a lot of fears at rest or more importantly proving that something is actually possible, even if I think their result ain’t so hot. At least they did it… and I welcomed that advice and knowledge and saved myself untold amounts of pain.

To that end, then, let me give some advice.

If you are working on a big project, with “big project” tentatively defined as “a project that takes long enough that you go to sleep and wake up multiple times before it is finally finished” and especially if your project involves other entities, you will encounter at least a few cases of entirely lame stupid shit that will amaze you. You will doubt that this lame stupid shit is normal, expected and a part of the process. You might in fact think that it’s you. It’s not you.

Some of us have had to deal with lame shit all our lives. Some of it is so ingrained we barely recognize it as lame shit any more (things once made of strong metal are now weak plastic, advertising is pervasive, public space is no longer considered requirement for dressing nicely), but that’s just low-level stuff; I mean the lame shit that people deal with like being denied stuff they need for absolutely no good reason, or being given poor quality product because they’re in no position to argue. That sort of lame is out there too; please don’t think I’m diminishing it here.

But when you set off to do a new thing, like make a film or a song or build a structure or learn to drive, you will have a heightened sense of things going just right. You’ll want to get things just so so you’ll be paying attention where maybe otherwise you wouldn’t be quite so hyperfocused on the little things. And I am telling you now that you will inevitably encounter stupid shit indeed, shit that will make you wonder how the world even functions when all these little secret rules and made-up fakery and terrible contingencies are propping the whole jalopy up.

When the industrial revolution happened, more than ever before, a process of optimization happened. Processes which were done by people could now be done by machines and that required a rebooting of thought, of interaction with the world. In one way, this was great – we could make stuff better and faster. In other ways, not so good: the machines were huge, occasionally ate children operating them, and the resultant product had to lose quite a bit along the way the be easily consistent into the hundreds or thousands of copies.

We are now in the process of cutting over a whole new range of processes; processes again thought to be the place of human beings but which machines can do in analogue; sorting, collating, designating, compiling. Yes, a human being will do a better job but a human being can’t do millions of images either, so there’s an advantage butting against a disadvantage here, and the machine is going to win – it’s cheaper and faster, ultimately, or it will be once we downgrade the quality and expect a new generation of people to accept lame shit as the baseline.

So here you are, person who is coming into the whole mess, with your creation or business or situation, and you see stuff that is lame and stupid and weird and inefficient and you will go “What the hell is going on here?”

Sometimes, well, often, the person you will deal with in these situations will have no idea why this is the case. It’s the way it is and they do it this way and welcome to the center ring, newest stuffed-in-car clown! Get ready for your pie! And you will see all the pieces there, all the things lying together, and you will think you could point this out, but the fact is, everyone knows this is the way, and someone, somewhere might even know the reason why, but on the other hand there might not be any reason why at all.

Concrete examples, you say. Fine.

• When you order items to be duplicated, especially in the thousands, you will be told that you can’t get it in the quantity you ordered; it is likely to be anywhere up to 10 percent over or under. You will not be charged for stuff you didn’t get, but you are in no way guaranteed the numbers.
• The definition for “you need a permit for that” in larger cities if you shoot video or film is “you put a tripod on the ground”. Therefore some movie-makers put their cameras on tripods on trucks, so they don’t touch the ground. Or shoot out a window while moving in a car, again obviating the need for a permit.

So what got me to remember to tell you this was that I contacted a digital distribution service (Tesco), one of these sites that makes films available. They have a few movies up and they offer you ways to buy and otherwise get the movies (although they still seem to prefer WMV for its delicious DRM) and so I thought it couldn’t hurt to at least contact them and get terms.

There was no e-mail address, just a technical support address. So I hit THEM with a request. And said “Hi, I have a movie and want to talk about distributing through you. How can I do that?”

This is what I got:

Dear Jason

Thank you for your email.

I am sorry but we are not able to deal with this type of enquiry in
the Customer Service Centre.  I would have to ask you to re-direct the information
you have sent us to our Buying Team.  You can contact our Buyers by writing to:

The Buying Team
Tesco Stores Ltd.
New Tesco House.
Delamare Road
Waltham Cross
Cheshunt.
Hertfordshire.
EN8 9SL.

Our Buyers do receive many enquiries and, I am sorry we cannot supply telephone numbers
or email addresses.

I am sure that if the team would like more details of the product from you, they will write
back as soon as possible.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us at
customer.service@tesco.co.uk quoting TES5811116X.

Kind Regards
Gary Falconer
Customer Service Manager
Tesco Customer Service

Now, what’s being said here is “Because you want to distribute a movie through us, you must write us a letter and mail us in the UK through postal mail and if we’re interested we’ll mail back”.

I have a little internal rule: if you have to go through HR to apply for a job, you have failed. I believe this because my experience is that HR’s job is to tell you to fuck right off, because we’re looking for superstars, and it’s the executives who pal around at various functions and places who go “well now, let’s see what we can do for you” and THEN HR’s job is to settle where your paychecks go.

I wrote to technical support because this is the only way to contact Tesco. This is apparently the same as going for a job through HR, because they’re making me jump through a lot of hoops with my movie for the privilege of begging a place to distribute my movie.

It’s fucking lame and stupid. But I’ll certainly do it, because I said I was going to try this whole thing out.

But it’s not me. It’s the way this place works and a lot of places work this way. That’s how it is.

So cheer up, emo kid. It could be worse. And will be.

The problem with the GET LAMP web presence is that it’s sort of full of stuff and then not. I just recently got a spate of is this still on? is this still happening? e-mails and I decided that it was time to put a weblog dedicated to it up so that I could update that. This one stays in action but the other is going to split off and take over the duties for the documentary. You might see doubled entries (I might re-use previous entries from this weblog here, as necessary) and other such foolishness, but if you’re keeping track of the movie, it will help a lot.

The new weblog is at inventory.getlamp.com. I’m using Wordpress over there because I intend to get out of the Movable Type business sooner rather than later and this will let me ease into the new features and potential for enjoyable stuff. It took me a very short time to get used to it and I already miss a few features over here (to be somewhat fair, my version of movable type is older than the Wordpress version, so obviously some stuff is missing).

Anyway, you get to see me touching it up before it goes public.

I assure you that beyond all reason and clarity, these photos indicate that the Get Lamp project is coming along well.

So another commenter asked me about what I would do about DRM associated with digital distribution, considering my pretty strong beliefs on it. Well, it gets complicated and weird, but I hope I can justify myself or at least make sense.

The comment asks me if I’m talking about distributing through PBS or did I mean broadcasting. I mean broadcasting. Sorry for being misleading. That’s what I mean when I talk about video or cable channels; where they show people the movie and the word gets around about it. And as I discussed previously, cable channels are stellar at putting hard work up at popular times like 8:30am and then saying “gee, we didn’t get the numbers”. But let’s keep our hearts and minds open!

My position on DRM is actually similar to Linus Torvalds’, which is not compatible with Richard Stallman’s, and somewhat perpendicular to some other “copyfighters”. I have no problem with the idea of DRM per se, any more than I have issues with locks or controls in general. The idea of DRM, you see, is a pretty good one, even if it’s pretty pie in the sky. DRM is a core tenet of video games, of books, of a lot of creations, and the issue comes down to the methodology that the DRM is implemented by.

It is very difficult to pirate a gondola ride in Venice. It requires Venice, a Gondola, and a Gondola operator. Most of us who might want a gondola ride in Venice in our homes would be pretty tasked to do so; although, and I do contest this, it is possible – import lots of things from Venice (or stuff that looks like it), build a canal, fly in a Gondola operator, or an actor who could pilot a Gondola. This is, in fact, what the Las Vegas casino The Venetian did. Now, someone who has been to Venice might find that the Venetian’s gondola experience is lacking, but that’s kind of the nature of copies, isn’t it – they often lack some aspect of the original, and the consumer has to ask themselves if they are not getting their money’s worth. Certainly if it costs more to be at the Venetian than Venice, then yeah, you’re probably cheating yourself out. But for a lot of people, The Venetian will do. Look, I warned you about “complicated and weird”.

Venice’s location, brand name, and tradition of both Gondola building and operation are their DRM; very difficult to duplicate, leaving you with a shadow of the original. The intricate components, and interlocking of them, compose the “lock” that prevents easy duplication.

Compare this with making a paper airplane. You can go right here and make a paper airplane easily, anywhere in the world. You can even avoid using Ben’s excellent instructions and make one on your own without consulting him. You need a piece of paper and air. the DRM on paper airplanes is weak – the instructions are so simple, the process so complete, that you need not think about the issue of copying – it very nearly copies itself (a kid sees a paper airplane being folded and can do it themselves).

Now, there is a very possible chance that a percentage of people totally on the fence about Venice vs. Venetian will choose Venetian over Venice, screwing over potential dollars for Venice. And should Sony produce a Paper Airplane movie and sell paper airplanes, people will make their own paper airplanes, and some might even draw a Sony logo or design on it. If the paper airplane/gondola crazes increase to a sufficient amount, some internal barrier will be breached and someone, somewhere, the kind of person who drinks themselves to sleep or who thinks MTV invented the music video will go “Now wait a minute, this is devastating to our business.” And then a Very Stupid Thing will happen.

In this event, the DRM was sufficient until the time it became insufficient, a time that was rare and a very special set of circumstances. The DRM does not preclude people making additional Vencii or Paper Airplanes, but given enough money showing up, some fuck will make it a problem. Follow?

Let’s bring this back to stuff you’re probably more comfortable with.

Everyone’s done Music, Movies and Books to death. Let’s go with Broadway Shows.

Broadway shows come in two forms currently, three if you’re feeling generous: Broadway, Touring Production and Las Vegas. In all three cases, to experience it properly, you need to go to a location, either a few blocks near Times Square in New York City, to a local large theater during a two or three week period, or to Las Vegas. The limitations here are specific: geography and time. You need to be in a place at the right time. In that place, a lot of money is spent to give you a full cast, a full crew, and they will put on a show for you.

Analogues exist outside of these venues – you can buy the soundtrack of the performance, but obviously you don’t tend to get the complete show, with songs and pieces cut out, and you definitely don’t get either the visuals or the visceral experience of being at a live performance. For some people, this is sufficient regardless. For others it is not.

It is also possible to see Broadway productions in other venues. These are usually not put on until a significant length or end of a current Broadway production. The productions pay a fee, either a royalty or flat, to put on the production. People who go to these are generally not going to get a Broadway Production either. But they’ll get an analogue. And they’re happy with that.

So here the DRM, the management of the material, is being contained along several vectors, and are dependent on technology not increasing on cell phones or other recording devices to bring more of the experience into a duplicate-friendly format. Once it does, well, then we’re going to have a problem. Or, I should say, Broadway Shows will have a problem and they will start making it a problem for others as well.

As I referenced, other media, specifically pre-recorded, easy-to-duplicate media, already are swimming in this soup. This is partially their own fault, because they started banking heavily on these easily-duplicated units (CDs, records, tapes, videotapes, DVDs, books) without spending too much time building up other potential sources of revenue as much as they might have, as insurance. Broadway shows are going to experience this down the line, and are starting to: take, for example, Phantom of the Opera, which has transcended traditional Broadway Experience and is now a full-on franchise, with massive variations of media and locations to protect or at least defend. It’s how things will likely go, since the money is just too good.

Take a deep breath.

(By the way, if you’ve ever had dinner with me, this is exactly how I talk about things. Just ask around.)

The BBS Documentary, as a product, is easily duplicated. It’s either three ISOs (about 18gb) or, if you are happy with just the MPEGs themselves, less than 3gb of files. That’s not a lot anymore; less than it was when it came out and less every day. Downloading a game demo is sometimes one or two gigabytes now. The actual unit of sale is either an ISO or a .MPG (or .AVI or so on). Each copy is not hand crafted, each creation is not wistfully maneuvered into place by me wearing a jewelers’ monocle readying it for a diamond-encrusted setting. It’s a box with plastic in it, or it’s a couple files. It takes me a little time to pack up the items in a box, but that’s it for per-unit work. To act otherwise is to be really naive.

My DRM, then, is pretty miniscule. You need to either get a piece of plastic from me, or you need to go to a couple hundred easy locations on the Internet and download what version of my work you want. One way pays me and one doesn’t. Either way you see my movie and that is awesome. If I act like someone who sees it the other 99 ways is stealing from me, I end up with cancer of the rage, and that shit doesn’t go away.

I never want the access I granted to people, and how I distributed it, and how the product is available, to go away. That’s a precursor to any sales. I will not grant any place an exclusive right to sale. I suspect this will cut me out of a number of locations, just on the terms of their K-Razy Terms Of Service. I haven’t checked. I will.

If the place does not have that limit, and I sell them distribution rights (or, if you prefer to think of it, I license the right to distribute to the place), then they are going to do what they do. They are probably going to slap DRM on it, and they’re going to make all sorts of nutty garbage on it, and they’re going to do this as part of how they work. To this end, my own personal beliefs will kick in and I will therefore say the following falls under “pisses me off”:

• Combining it with advertising. I’m still of the school that being paired with an advertiser endorses that advertiser’s product. Therefore if my movie begins with an ad for Salsa-Flavored Rape Chips, you would be entitled to think that I probably have a few bags of Salsa-Flavored Rape Chips and/or think the smoky taste combo of Pepper Jack Cheese and Rape is a worthwhile product.
• Breaking it up with other crap. This falls under splitting up the works into even more parts, or making you see part of it and then pay for more, or making you pay for an improved version instead of crappy initial version.
• Making me get less than 40 percent of the cover price. I hate that. For one main reason: people think I’m making more than I really am. Amazon takes 55 percent of my cover charge for my DVDs, and I consider that pushing it. Less than that and people are paying and I’m getting a few bucks.
• Weird demands that will turn off my technical audience, like limiting to a platform unnecessarily or insisting on software installations. Exception: iTunes.

Other than that, fine.

So, iTunes. Here’s the thing about iTunes: It is a resource-hogging, closed-down locked piece of shit. But people love it! They love having a little machine that can play these little locked down files they pay for. The machine will play open-formatted files and you don’t have to buy anything to make it work, so it is very hard for me to say no to it. So I am all for iTunes, as long as they don’t demand exclusive selling rights, and as long as what people get is an episode of my movie without unwanted “extras”. That’s how it fits in my moral structure and feelings on DRM.

Steam is similar – you pay for stuff and then it comes to you in locked down form. People, again, seem to be fine with this. If Steam allows you to download the movie and watch it, and doesn’t break it up with ads or other modifications, fine. Good.

Netflix streaming. Xbox Live. All good. Any and all. Keep to those rules and we’ll be fine. Gondolas for all.

But I agree that there’s a great chance a lot of this is going to run up against someone in there, someone who sees free gondolas and broadway shows going out the door and will want to lock them down. At that point I will walk away and let you know I did.

And that is what I think.

Honestly, I usually pay for dinner for listening to these rants.